Unity 3D and iOS Development
Posts tagged Game development
Old School Code Review – Pen & Paper
Mar 31st
Every once in a while when I get to a certain point in a project, I like to back up and make sure I’m not missing the forest for the trees. That’s when I print out a lot of code and head for the coffee shop.
Forest for the trees
Getting down and dirty in the code and living in the code editor is what programmers really enjoy doing, but it’s good sometimes to take a few steps back. I start by identifying all of the major pieces of code (if a class has only has a few lines and one function, I can probably skip it for this review) and make sure I’ve got a stack of paper in the printer. Next, I make sure that whatever IDE or editor I’m using supports syntax highlighting when printing because not all of them do. When I’m programming with Unity, this typically means UniSCITE which has syntax highlighting in both code and print and supports highlighting the various keywords and comments and things like that. Of critical importance is that comments and comment blocks are colored, preferably in a color like green that is still readable but doesn’t just jump off the page. You want your code to jump off the page at you, not your comments. If your editor prints out page numbers and filenames on each page at the top or bottom — all the better.
Sparky the Road Clown – Evolution of an Idea
Mar 17th
When I tell people I’m making a game about running over clowns, I invariably get the “wow, how on earth did you come up with that idea??” look and/or question. This article will trace the evolution of that idea, the gameplay and the graphics from a silly name to a finished game.
Just a name
The name Sparky the Road Clown is actually a name I’d had in my head for years. When somebody would cut me off in traffic or something like that, I’d say something like, “Hey, Sparky- nice driving!” or “Watch it, Sparky!” and I imagine a lot of other people say similar things. Over time, I associated Sparky and road craziness and I came up with the name Sparky the Road Clown and even came up with a little backstory: he used to be Sparky the Rodeo Clown but had since gone off the deep end and became Sparky the Road Clown. This name (and the concept of rodeo clown to road clown) stuck in my head for several years before iPhones were even around.
Unity3D + dimeRocker = iPhone + Facebook
Jun 25th
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m using Unity3D as my development environment, and I’m planning to deploy to iPhone and Facebook. I’m using Unity3D on my PC to create the application that I’m then moving that every so often (one way) to Unity iPhone on the Mac. While this isn’t an optimal workflow, it’s still not bad at all if you’re planning to deploy to a platform besides iPhone (like say, Facebook). In a few months (weeks?), Unity 3.0 will be coming out and it will have a single, unified development environment and I imagine that what I’m doing now will be much easier, but when I started development on this project in the fall, that wasn’t an option. I did realize pretty early on in the process that I wanted to deploy out to Facebook and that it wouldn’t be that much more trouble (and I was right, thankfully). In March, at the GDC (Game Developers Conference), dimeRocker began making themselves known to the world. It sounded like a perfect match for me — it works with Unity, and they provide a series of addons to integrate your Unity3D game to Facebook.