Smarty Games

Work continues on the second kid’s game I’m building. I doubt it’ll be of any interest to readers, aside from the design lessons I’ve learned (and maybe the Unity experience I’ve gained), but the work-in-progress is lingering on the site if you want to hunt for it :)

I’m about 50% complete, in regards to all the features it could have. I won’t add them all, of course. I’d like to wrap up work on it by the end of the year and then take what I’ve learned onto a new project. I’ve created several helper classes and whatnot that will carry over to other Unity projects.

I have also written a design document for it and I’m also creating a “how did implementation go?” document; I spent some time on both of these this morning after doing a bout of editing on the Lazy Designer books.

What About Unity?

In all I’m fairly pleased with how flexible Unity is to work with. My main limitation towards developing a game is my lack of artistic skill (and general lack of understanding of art and animation requirements)! What do I mean by flexibility? Well, it was near trivial to give players the ability to color the various components of the robot they are building in the kid’s game — as was the core robot-building mechanism. I expected more struggles with this, to be honest. And with the games/prototypes I’m working on right now the Unity workflow, though far from what I’d want in a more design-heavy game, is sufficient and I’m growing more accustomed to it.

The next project will be a bit more ambitious, so I’ll see if the workflow scales well to that.