Hanford's Introduction

News & General Discussion
1

Hi everyone, I’ve been spending so much time here that I thought I’d introduce myself!

My name is Hanford Lemoore, and I am a game designer and user interface designer. I’ve done both professionally.

From an Interface Design standpoint, I’ve been lucky enough to work on many cool things: ReplayTV, the Netflix Player from Roku, Dreamweaver, Bose sound systems, and more. I’m currently doing UI design and game design for Walt Disney Imagineering.

But my real passion has been video games. In the mid 90s I worked on some of the first 3D video games from LucasArts – Jedi Knight, Outlaws, and a few others. I gave up my video game career to do UI (which I also love with a passion) but I never gave up games. I just switched from doing it as a day job to something I do in evenings and the weekends. I put out a few 2D games on my site http://www.monolux.com . While I had done 3d work in the past, I stayed away from it on my indies games because I always thought the art paths and tools weren’t developed enough for a small operation.

I’ve not released a new indie game in a few years, but as you can see from my recent forum activity, I’ve jumped into Unity head first, and have been completely blown away. Unity has made me completely rethink what is possible from a small game studio, and I’m kicking myself for not checking out Unity sooner (I had the trial downloaded onto my Mac for a year, but I never installed it!) I hope to have a demo project soon, and a commerical game out next year. Other tools I’m into: Adobe Director, Lightwave, Photoshop, and Wacom Tablets.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to learning, and hopefully helping out a bit, too.

I keep a blog at http://blog.hanfordlemoore.com . I’m going to try and post what I’m learning about Unity as I go, with a focus on uncluttered examples and a slant towards scripters who never learned a real programming language (that’s me).

Thanks!

~Hanford

2

Wow, somone who worked for LucasArts. I like the the picture on your site.

Welcome! :O)

3

Hiya Handford!
Yes I noticed you seem active, I believe we’ve crossed on the beta list. Welcome indeed, glad to have a veteran aboard! a Lucas veteran no less :smile:

4

Welcome Hanford! I’m anxious to see what you create with Unity, good stuff I’m sure.

I looked at your blog and noticed in your “Unity day 11” post that many of your wishes have to do with scripting. … I strongly suggest that you switch to C# so that you can use an IDE that offers code-completion. I don’t understand how anyone can live without real code completion when writing code! I use MonoDevelop on the Mac and I know others use Visual Studio Express on Windows. This would solve many of the case sensitivity issues you are experiencing and increase you overall productivity when writing code.

5

Part of the problem is that the languages supported in Unity aren’t really nice and easy compared to what other high level tools offer in terms of syntax, documentation, case sensitivity, same goes for the Unity commands. Unity is capable but the way you access it via scripting could be enhanced in many aspects.

6

Welcome Hanford!

Unity and this community have changed my life. I’m sure they will do so for you too. Everyone on this forum has been most helpful and friendly. The best community on the web.

Without a doubt, the next wave of incredible games and interactive apps from the indy community is coming from people on this forum.

Just dive in and get ready for the ride of your life!

Cheers,

—Josh

7

Welcome to the Unity forum Hanford! Hope to see some of your games/demos soon. Make also sure to stop by at the Unity artist forum over here:

http://www.theunityartist.com

See ya around!

Thomas P.

8

I’ve known ya a long time now Hanford but I’ll say it anyway: nice to meet you! Now, let’s get that beer we’ve been talkin’ about.

:slight_smile:

9

Thanks for the warm welcome, everyone! I hope to post a little game by the end of the year. Nothing spectacular; just a starter project.

Re: JS vs C#
When I made my post “Unity: day 11” I was still using textedit to write scripts (Unitron wouldn’t run on my ancient Mac!) but since I’ve upgraded to an editor with code completion. I chose JS because I’m trying to have to learn as few new tools as possible, and JS seemed closer to PHP (which I already use), and coulf carry over a bit into browser development (despite the differences between Unity Javascript and browser Javascript).

I’ve quickly come up to speed with development – making a lot less errors and learning my way around. I found the ExpandoObject script on the Wiki (Thanks to freyr!), which really helped me do things in an Director-esque way.

I look forward to sharing what I learn with everyone!
~Hanford

PS: Yes Tom, in the new year! Cheers!

10

Hey Hanford

Welcome to the community! Looking forward to experiencing your additions.

11

Hi Hanford,

So you’re now using Unitron?

12

Hi Hanford, welcome to the community :slight_smile:

Nice to hear you worked on Outlaws, I loved that game… I used to play with the build engine quite a bit when I was younger. fun times :slight_smile:

I hope you enjoy your time with unity, I’ve been using it since may last year and its been a fantastic experience.

Welcome!

  • Unity rocks!
13

Maybe the Unity forums could use a “Introductions” section, that way new members could post a hello-type thing (without it actually having to post about something specific, like a question) and get to know one another.

It might help those that may be a little timid about posting for the first time. A sort of ice-breaker.

Especially with the upcoming 2.5 release, I foresee a large influx of new members.

14

Outlaws was interesting … we used autocad to design the layout of the levels, and we textured them inside the game engine itself, and all scripting was done via a language called INF. INF was incredibly frustrating to use. Because of that, scripting cool stuff rarely happened.

I then moved onto Jedi Knight, where we had our own level editor (LEIA) and scripting language (COG).

LEIA was VERY similar to Unity from a scripting standpoint: variables in scripts appeared in a property inspector and you could drag objects (called “things”, because the term “object” was so overused) onto it.

Thanks for the warm welcome everyone!

15

A “Hi” from here too! Outlaws was awesome. I still have the soundtrack from it in iTunes. :slight_smile:

16

Howdy Hanford, and welcome to the forum!

17

Welcome to the fold Hanford! :slight_smile:

(Level 15 in JK is still one of my favorite game levels :slight_smile: )

18

Level 15 will go down in history!!

I can give you some facts: the level itself does NOT spin or rotate in any way, although most who play it think it does! It was designed as a horizontal ship, and then rotated in the level editor to just the right angle … then coded up with all sorts of goodies that threw crates and whatnot around. And making a timed level in an otherwise timed game can add a LOT.

For what it’s worth: I was told that the level editor could not handle the precision of rotating geometry correctly and that we could not trust rotation. This was made crazier by the rule that every shape in the engine had to be convex. On top of that, the engine supported Ngons (up to 16 sides, i think) but had to be planar. Why, oh why, allow the level editor to make Ngons, but the game engine CRASH if the Ngons were not planar? Tris would have been a blessing, in retrospect. Ugh)

Anyway, back to the falling ship: No one on the team thought you could build a level, rotate it, and still have it compile and play without crashing. I don’t think anyone ever tried it. Jake is an amazing designer though – he took over my levels when I left – and did a hell of a job.

Level 15 of Jedi Knight is legendary :slight_smile: