Deps's Blog

It was a wild ride! Found out about the Rogue competition and decided in a heart beat to enter. I have recently started to use Unity, and thought it would be a great tool to use, and I was not mistaken. 

And I love a good competition. The prizes are not the important bit for me. I enjoy the short time frame and the pressure to get things done. My brain works best at times like that.

What went right?

I used Unity and did not regret it! It's full of wonderful little gems one can use while scripting the logic. It imports the assets automatically so it's as easy as dropping something in the right folder and it's there. The drag and drop interface makes it quick and easy to build the game world, while the scripting makes it easy to get things to do what I want them to do, and to extend the editor itself. 

The game turned out quite ok, I think. If I dare say so myself. It's not the game of the century, or even the decade. It looks like it's 2 decades old, but that's intended. It plays quite nice too. But I can't reallt say that, can I? I made the damn thing. But I have heard nice things about it from other people. :)

The length of the competition was just right, for me. 2 weeks is plenty of time! One week was plenty of time, too. I have been in competitions that lasts for months, and it's hard for me to keep motivated. I think I should enter these competitions fashionably late from now on. The pressure of the approaching deadline does wonders to my motivation. 

What went wrong?

My first idea. The idea was quite ok. Stand on the roof of a house and throw a rope with a hook down to steal bags of money from people who walk around below. The development went ok too. But when it came to animations it all went belly up. I could not get Unity and Blender to work together and everything with an animation was imported into unity all distorted. Found some advice on the main Unity forum, but was not able to fix it. So I scrapped the idea alltogether and started from scratch again, with only a week left of the competition. Something I do not regret doing. :)

Spagetti code. It went ugly in the end. The todo entry "Cleanup and Refactor" was constantly pushed down the list, and it had a "LOW" priority from day 1. It should have been pushed up. And I knew it. But time was running short and I needed to do this and that. It's hard to balance these things, but it's also very important. For example: the AI uses some sort of bastardalized A* code, and it works fairly well. You may not notice it, but I do. They walk around stuff, they try to take the shortest path. But the code is a mess. It's divided in two chunks that's basically doing the same thing. Some functions are identical, since I just copy pasted it from one to the other. It's in a major need of a cleanup. But I didn't have time. I had to make it work, no matter what. The game needed it. And the result is horrible, and I suspect it's the father of some of the bugs I have heard about since the release. :)

Final words

This was fun, and I will do it again! Try and stop me if you can! I suggest that you come too. It's a hell of a lot of fun. Peace!