Hi Everyone,
I need some thoughts and comments on a game I wont to build for myself and some friends.
About Me
I’m a PHP, Javascript, HTML and CSS developer with some vb.net experience.
Goal
I want to have a real world city (my city) where I can drive around. I want to then have car chases around it.
I want to start in my suburb and expand outwards as I add more of my city.
Questions
I have heaps of questions and are only just exploring Unity now. I’m just after thoughts, comments and input at this stage, I’m not expecting to have a complete game built in the weekend and realize this will take some time.
- What would you start with. I’m guessing I’ll need city boundaries and a car object. The car object will move on the X, Y and Z axis?
- How can I add roads etc as a basic start but then add more detailed building one by one.
- Info on other objects. Cars, Pedestrians, Buses etc.
- How do you make you city limits huge in a single game like this?
- I may want to make this a sharing game where I need to find then chase my friends in a cop car etc.
I’ve got so many questions so would like to see how this goes. As I said, not looking for complete solutions here. It’s just comments and ideas.
Welcome! By the nature of your questions, I’m gonna guess you’re starting from zero with Unity, here. So I’ll point you towards my FAQ that has answers for a lot of common questions people have when they’re starting out.
Most importantly: do the tutorials. You do have a slight advantage by having experience with PHP and Javascript, but don’t let that trick you into thinking you can skip to the advanced stuff. I also started out doing web development (and still do for my day job), but Unity is a whole different beast, and pride will only hold you back.
You’re free to dive into your grand game idea, but doing so sets you up for frustration and failure. That’s why nearly everyone here will advise you to start with much smaller and more manageable ideas while you’re learning.
Good luck!
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Thanks for the reply, you’ve got some great FAQ’s and I agree with what you’re saying. I’m actually viewing thees videos now. I don’t expect to start writing code some a few months as I stand by 80% of development is in the design and 20% it writing it.
Just looking for wider comments on some issues i’m unsure of. Maybe the videos will help with that.
That’s true, but even if you spend several months designing your code, you will still get it wrong. (There are several reasons for this we can go into if you wish.)
A more productive approach is to dive in, choosing the simplest design that gets the job done at every turn — but hiding those design decisions as much as possible, so when you need to refactor later, it’s not too hard to do so. Be nimble and flexible, and you’ll be better off in the long run than planning out a big complex architecture that you are wedded to, and so can’t adapt when requirements (or your understanding of the details) change.
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To reiterate what Joe said, I also think you should be writing code sooner rather than later. Understand that you’ll do things the wrong way early on, but doing it wrong and learning from that is the best way to grow your skills, I find.
In theory, it sounds great to be able to plan things out perfectly ahead of time and minimize the amount of wasted effort, but in reality, you won’t know if something will really work until you try it.
There’s no substitute for experience, and no shortcuts I know of, so dive in there and start gaining as much as you can now!
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everyone here is jumping at the code, but it sounds like code will be about 10 of your game.
the other 90% will be the city. depending on how detailed you want it, that alone will probably take years.
You would still want some scripting to walk/drive around your city, but the code will be pretty stagnant for most of this project.
-I vote you should get started with modeling/spriting
-start with a road, or even a mesh/texture sheet and add on to it as you go, while optimizing occasionally
-most of your other cars will have the same-ish ai script on it. people will have their own, but each car and person will have to get made. you can copy paste at the beginning to fill up the scene though to see where it hangs
-make a huge map(or a small map, scaled)
-Unity definitely does networking easily
read this… news
I helped some with this game
oh, and the VW sound effects were all taken from my car, cause I drove one of those at the time.