Last year, before I started working on my Frozen game, I started with something a bit simpler for my then-3 year old – a 2D Little Mermaid game. I wanted to make something very simple to teach basic 2D pad controls with minimal buttons required. On the plus side, no UI or text was required […]
I’ve published my first asset on the Unity Asset Store! Find it for free here: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/fence-layout-tool-162856 Or get the code directly from GitHub: https://github.com/AndyFenwick/FenceLayout [EDIT: If anyone is interested, it’s had 142 downloads in the first five weeks after release. 29 in the first three days but it’s steadily getting a few each day since. […]
I bought a bunch of the popular Unity landscape tools recently, namely Gaia Pro, Vegetation Studio Pro, Complete Terrain Shader and River Auto Material. I also picked up a couple of the Nature Manufacture asset packs. Here’s a little video of using the tools to quickly create a landscape. Note that I have spent a […]
It’s been a while. Turns out that having a child takes up a lot of your free time. Who knew. It’s a tricky balancing act with children and technology. Too much screen time is bad, but they need to learn to use technology and feel comfortable with it. Being from a tech background, I often […]
I’ve pretty good at quite a lot of things, but I’ve always been a bit embarrassed about not being able to speak a second language. A couple of GCSEs in French and German was as far as I got, and that’s now mostly faded. This famously isn’t rare for English speakers, but after years of concentrating […]
It’s been a slow year on the blog. This is mainly due to taking up a few new hobbies (learning Norwegian, and getting into astronomy and astrophotography) and preparing for a new child. I may write about some of these in future. But in the meantime I’ve done a little bit of work on my previously-untitled “spaceship game”, and […]
Just before Christmas I had a couple of days off work and planned to give Elite a proper play, but then something happened: a friend very kindly bought me a copy of Kerbal Space Program. I knew of the game and I’d always been curious, but I assumed I would quickly get bored of a […]
The wait is over, Elite: Dangerous has been out for a month now and I’ve been playing it quite a lot. I was going to wait until it was actually released before diving in, but I had the chance to borrow an Oculus Rift DK2 for a weekend right at the end of the beta, […]
This is part 2 of how my spaceship building/fighting game is structured. Find part 1 here. Space network synchronisation Each player’s ship consists of a parent object with a PlayerShip script and a Rigidbody 2D, and a bunch of children (one for each attached ship module). I very much like the fact that you can […]
A little while ago I posted about my spaceship building/fighting game, made in Unity. Because Unity is quite different to how I’m used to writing games (pure C++), it required a bit of getting used to how to structure things. This post will give a high level overview of how it works and all fits […]
I’ll try to keep this brief, I don’t normally like to get too serious on here and everything has been said before more eloquently that I could put it. I 100% support Anita Sarkeesian and her work on Feminist Frequency, as well as everyone else who has received abuse as a result of working on […]
Today’s post is a rather mixed bag of vaguely-related topics. Lets kick off (ahem) with Kickstarter… Kickstarter Last weekend I was supposed to be at Alt-Fest, a crowd-funded goth/metal/industrial festival that was shaping up to be awesome. Then three weeks ago it imploded spectacularly – cancellation rumours circulated on Twitter, before finally a statement was released saying […]
It’s become a bit of a tradition now that when I host a LAN I show up with a new game prototype (although as it’s usually six months between them that’s not saying a lot). This time was my first attempt in Unity, and it got its first outing a couple of weeks back. Conveniently […]
It’s been a while since the last post, mainly because I’ve had two LAN parties in the last two weeks and getting my first Unity game prototype into a playable state has taken priority. But more about that one later. In the meantime, here is a prototype I made at the end of last year (complete with terrible programmer art). […]
Chestenham Science Festival is quickly becoming a must-attend event in my calendar. This year I went down for the Friday and Saturday with my wife and we attended half a dozen events. From my limited experience I think you could pick any event at random and be almost certain to hear something fascinating. Here are […]
Everyone I know (for “everyone” = “programmers”, anyway) seems to be trying out Unity and I’d heard much praise about how easy it is for rapid prototyping. Enough to make me take a look. My very first thought, going through one of the tutorials, was “this feels like cheating”. One of the basic tutorials is a vertical scrolling shooter, […]
I recently dug up my university dissertation and related code, and was surprised that it still runs and isn’t as bad as I feared. It was pretty interesting at the time so I thought I’d share. It was a good call to choose a project in the games/puzzle area, as I’m pretty sure that helped me […]
Time for an epic game roundup post. LAN parties, for me, and the best way to play games. Getting a load of friends together in the same room for some quality gaming time is great. There is just one recurring problem: finding games that are enjoyable for everyone to play. Ideally we all play the same thing, and the preference […]
Now that I don’t make games for a living I find that I’m more inclined to do so in my free time. Nothing even approaching a releasable standard, but it keeps me amused, and is an excuse to mess around with network programming. Occasionally I’ll inflict a messy prototype on my friends at a LAN […]
The last year has seen much discussion about the price of energy. Nuclear plants, wind turbines, fracking, price caps and green subsidies are a staple part of the news and political vocabularies. And as usual with politics, most of the arguments make no sense when you examine the economics. Externalities But before I get into […]