Variety may be the spice of life

But it sure as hell doesn't get you anywhere when it comes to a project.

What am I talking about? Well, since that last post I have 'put on hold' the POTUS game, started a top-down-zombie-shooter-tower-defense game on XNA and now, I have gone a little Hollywood.

That's right, 3D. I have also gone into Unity, which has made quite the impression on me in these super early stages.

In two hours, with great help from this dude, I have made a 3D 'cube floor' with a 3D 'evil cube' chasing me on it:

The red line is a debug line showing what the evil cube is targeting (which is poor old me!).

I wanted to go 3D and I wanted to work on writing AI, as I had little to no idea on how to do it. And voilà, two birds with one stone. Of course this is all basic stuff but any step is a good step.

The great thing about Unity is, all that took literally about five lines of code. The controls, graphics, even the targeting was all handled by Unity. All I had to say was in basic code "move evil cube to where player is" and done. As Mr Burns would say, that is simply, eeexceeleeent.

I could write more about how great Unity is but is there any need. And anyway this is not a Unity advertisement but it just goes to show as someone who is new to all this, how a widely accepted game engine like Unity, even to a newbie, immediately shows why it is widely accepted.


So, the big question - What is next? Well, I would like to actually finish one project but I can't seem to help venturing off to new exciting places. After all, this is a hobby but there is no harm in a hobby turning into a portfolio of sort I guess. Which means the plan is to finish the top-down-zombie-shooter-tower-defense game on XNA.

Speaking of which, here it is in all it's early-stage glory (programmers never were good at art):

Credit for tutorials/help to this dude

It is worth noting the back end of the top-down-zombie-shooter-tower-defense game is super tidy. It is definitely the tidiest project I have made and I am very proud of it in that aspect.

The game side of it, I will try a couple of small detail things that won't blow anyone away but hopefully will make for somewhat an intriguing experience. They might not even work well, I just want to experiment with some game design.

Anyway, I'll make a separate post for that in a while when it advances a bit more. Today's post was all about variety (or ADHD), Unity, 3D and...EVIL CUBES!