Hi guys,
tonight I want to share with you what I spent the last 24 hours on. I decided to create a new project folder, load a few files into it, and see if I can build a game from beginning to the very end. And while I did so, I documented the progress with sporadic screenshots, so I can retrace my steps and see how long each one took. And I figured, it might be interesting to see for other people as well.
Now let me tell you, I am by no means a programmer, and even calling myself an indie would be insulting to the fine gentlemen sporting all the stylish tophats. A beginner level hobbyist is what I prefer to call myself, relying mostly on drag and drop assets and youtube tutorials. This project too, makes heavy use of the Buoyancy script as well as this wonderful little project.
But let’s start at the beginning. With a silly idea in an even sillier chat. Remember that you can always rightclick the picture and choose open picture to see it in full resolution. I tried to include timestamps in all pictures, those seem to be cut off in thread preview mode.
Then in took quite a few hours to decide what I am going to do, looking for blueprints and reference pictures, and setting everything up in cinema 4d. I decided to go with the Sea Duck from Duck Tales for the plane. Took around 3-4 hours to create the ~4k model and start UV mapping it.
That itself didn’t take too much, maybe an hour all in all. Very simple model and very bad UV map.
Another 40 minutes later it was textured. What you see is simply a yellow bucket emptied onto the texture, and a few darker lines drawn on top with a finger.
Time to see if it works in unity, quick export and the model is in the engine. Always nice to see that step work, even if its just a few polygons and pixels. And while I was there I spent some time creating a basic terrain just to have some sort of reference.
As you can see, the “I’ma just quickly do this… and then…” turned into quite a few hours adding the buoyancy script, the plane script, and modifying that to my needs. Basically I just set up a collider under the water surface to trigger the ground movement script of the plane, and disabled the automatic return to zero rotation the plane was doing. Other than that, the script was perfect, very arcade-ish feeling, easy to control and to set up. I didn’t even bother changing the textures of the instruments. Thought I’ll have some time left, but that wasn’t the case. Oh well. Of course I also encountered mad crazy bugs which I don’t now how to fix yet, we’ll see. Oh, and the waves behind the plane are just a trail renderer that unfortunately gets incredibly ugly in turns. But again, too much for me. So then I decided I should have at least one more object in the game world and went back to C4D for that.
From Unity back to Unity in three hours. Quite ashamed of the textures here 
. Those are from cgtextures, simply slapped onto the surfaces. But hey, those are just there to provide points to fly to. I intended to add a simple script that allows you to pick up boxes at one point, and then earn money for bringing them to the second one. Oh man those boxes. They were hovering in mid air. And they were hiding from triggers. And they were sinking. That’s what I spent most of the remaining time on. I obviously struggle writing code from scratch.
Oh god the clock. Meanwhile, the boxes are able to be bought, and dropped from the plane. And then they float. Like they should. But whatever I do, I can’t get the drop off point to register them properly. So looking at the clock, I decided to just despawn them wherever they drop after a few seconds, and give the player money for it regardless of his position. So after unsuccessfully trying to fix that issue, I decided to use the remaining time for a short splash screen to give the player a hint about the controls.
And then it was time for the build. Man, did the time fly in the last few hours. After a total of just a tiny bit over 24 hours, I am so incredibly tired I will most likely sleep the remaining days until the next semester begins, but it was an amazing experience for me, to see what I can do and what I cant, and more importantly, what I can do in just 24 hours with just the help of Unity and it’s community. I will continue to work on the project to fix as much stuff as I can, as soon as I figure out how. I strongly recommend you try something similar if you didn’t do that yet.
If you’re still reading, you have clearly deserved the webplayer.
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/87080615/Plane2.html
Try it out, have fun, tell me what you think, and thanks for reading!
I appreciate any suggestions and help you have too.