Now that Curious Blocks has been submitted to the App Store, I want to step back and take a minute to talk about what we’ve learned about the control aspect of AR apps and games.
We decided last year to … Read More
About Our Newest Project, Markd
The Why: Markd was born, quite simply, out of a personal need. At Pepwuper, a big part of my job is seeking out talent who can help on our various projects, both internal and for clients. … Read More
Good news – you can make a simple mobile game with no coding required!
Hi there. After the success of Brandon’s first online class, teaching students how to use Unity to make a 3D game (1600 students and counting!), we’ve … Read More
We will be at Reboot Develop, the biggest game developers conference in south east Europe, taking place from April 23 to 25 in the lovely city of Dubrovnik, Croatia. Brandon will be speaking at the conference alongside many of our heroes … Read More
We are going to Barcelona! Come visit our booth at Mobile World Congress from March 2nd to 5th. This will be the first time we are at MWC, one of the largest mobile conference in the world and we are … Read More
I realized I have essentially built a basic system for a 2D platformer after I finished recording the videos for our 2D Unity class. “Why waste a perfectly good prototype” I thought, so I decided to make a game out of it whenever I can find time.
There were a few different ways I thought about the design:
I knew I didn’t have a lot of time to craft levels, so I decided to take cues from the endless genre popular among mobile games and tweak it to fit the platforming gameplay – less focus on the running and more on the shooting and the jumping.
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Edit 2014-10-03: apparently there’s an even faster way to set this up (courtesy of /u/jakkarth). Right click on the search field on the custom search engine, “add as search engine”, and fill out the same forms as in Step 3 below (url is pre-filled for you). Awesome! Here’s a quick video:
One of the most essential tools I use when doing Unity development work is this Unity Reference Search Engine, it allows you to search multiple Unity related sites and communities at once (Unity documentation, Forum, Unity Answers, Wiki, MSDN, Reddit…etc). A lot of the issues you have in your game are probably already solved by other developers, and this little search tool allows us to quickly find solutions to problems.
However I found having to open a browser tab for this page, wait for this page to load, type in a search query, and wait again for the results can be a bit tedius. Fortunately in Chrome you can utilize the Address Bar (Omnibox) and the Edit Search Engines option to make this a lot quicker – I can now click on the Address Bar, type “u”, tab, then enter whatever I want to search for, and the only thing that gets loaded is the result page. Beautiful :)
(Note: I have only set this up on Chrome, although I suspect you can do this with Firefox as well.)
It’s fairly simple to set up.
Right click on the Address Bar, click on Edit Search Engines
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It’s time for another inspirational indie dev Q&A! This time, we talked with Charles Cox of 4gency, Seattle.
1. Name and location
Charles Cox from 4gency, in Seattle WA.
2. How long have you been an indie dev?
The studio has been around since late 2011 but I went full-time indie with it in September 2013. We’re now a team of five.
3. Games released?
Habitat (www.jointhe509th.com), Node.Hack for iOS/Android (www.nodehackgame.com), Armored Drive for iPhone (www.armoreddrivegame.com)
4. Sum up your game / studio style in 3 words
Epic emergent fun.
5. Your career path – in a nutshell – to here?
Twelve years, three game companies, ten different jobs. Wore as many hats as I could get away with. Specialized as quickly as possible, then generalized again when going indie.
6. Your favorite 3 tools or resources for indie development?
Google, Excel, Kindle. (Get answers. Prove your assumptions with numbers. Always be reading.)
7. Biggest lesson you’ve learned since being in the game?
We make extensive use of the brilliant Kenney’s 2D platformer art pack in our Unity + PlayMaker 2D class. Creator Kenney Vleugels has been producing excellent art assets that are freely available for game developers to experiment and build games with, and now he’s building a game developer community to host events, gamejams, and workshops called Kenney Land! He’s crowdfunding the project on IndieGogo where backers get a massive amount of art and sound assets – perfect for us experimenting with prototypes and learning our ways around Unity 2D!
Check out the IndieGogo Campaign here and back this project if you can!
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The awesome Robby Z is the creator of 8BitMMO, a giant construction sandbox game with over 500k+ registered players. The game has deservedly been featured on Joystiq, RPS, Massively, MMORPG.com, Yogscast, and many other quality publications. 8BitMMO has been Robby’s passion project for an incredible 12 years! I enjoyed the honest answers to my questions about being an indie developer.
1. Name and location
Robby Zinchak of Archive Entertainment, Seattle
2. How long have you been an indie dev?
I went full-time indie about three years ago, but was making indie games in my spare time many years previous.
3. Games released?
8BitMMO (http://8bitmmo.net)
4. Sum up your game / studio style in 3 words
Community Construction Awesomeness
5. Your career path – in a nutshell – to here?
Was an AP at Midway doing internal development, then went to Capcom & Microsoft on the game publishing side. I had always wanted to get back into indie development, and with the scene picking up, it was the perfect time to make a go at it.
6. Your favorite 3 tools or resources for indie development?
