So I’ve decided to try my hand at being a game developer after spending way too many hours thinking about it and wanting to do something more exciting than developing yet another web application. This isn’t the first time I’ve tried my hand at developing games either, I did a semester long course in games development back when I was in university. That course still rates as one of the most fun and interesting semesters I ever spent there, especially when your games were put up against the harshest critics I’ve ever met: the lecturer’s two kids. After finishing that course however I never really continued to try and make games until a mate of mine introduced me to Unity.
For a straight up programmer like myself Unity is a bit of an odd beast. The Unity editor reminded me of the brief foray I had with 3D Studio Max back in college, as it sported many of the same features like the split screen viewport and right hand column with all object’s properties in it. It’s very easy to navigate around and it didn’t take me long to whip up a simple littlesolar system simulator, albeit one that lacks any form of gameplay or semblance of realism. Still being able to go from never having used the product before to making something that would’ve taken me weeks in the space of a single weekend was pretty exciting, so I started about working on my game idea.
So of course the first game I want to make is based in space and the demo I’ve linked to before was the first steps to realizing the idea. It was however very unrealistic as the motion of the planet is governed by simply tracing out a circle, with no hint of gravity to influence things. Additionally the relative sizes and distances were completely ludicrous so I first set about making things a little more realistic to satisfy the scientist in me. Doing some rough calculations and devising my own in game scale (1 unit = 1,000KM) I made everything realistic and the result was pretty tragic.
The sun took up the vast majority of the screen until you zoomed out to crazy levels, at which point I couldn’t find where the hell my little planet had gotten off to. After panning around for a bit I saw it hiding about 4 meters above the top of my monitor, indistinguishable from the grey background it sat on. Considering this game will hopefully be played on mobile phones and tablets the thought of having to scroll like a madman constantly didn’t seem like a fantastic idea, and I relegated myself to ditching realism in favor of better gameplay. My artistic friend said we should go for something like “stylized physics”, which seems quite apt for the idea we’re going after.
It might seem obvious but the idea of suspending parts of reality for the sake of game play is what makes so many games we play today fun. The Call of Duty series of games would be no where near as fun if you got shot once in the arm and then proceeded to spend the next hour screaming for a medic, only to not be able to go back into the mission for another couple weeks while your avatar recuperated. The onus is on the developer however to find that right balance of realism and fantasy so that the unrealistic parts flow naturally into the realistic, creating a game experience that’s both fun and doesn’t make the player think that it’s an unrealistic (or unfathomable) mess.
I’m sure my walk down the game developer road will be littered with many obvious-yet-unrealized revelations like these and even my last two weeks with Unity have been a bit of an eye opener for me. Like with any of my endeavors I’ll be posting up our progress for everyone to have a fiddle with over in The Lab and I’ll routinely be pestering everyone for feedback. Since I’m not going at this solo anymore hopefully progress will be a little bit more speedy than with my previous projects and I’ll spend a lot less time talking about it 🙂
