What we have here on tis page was developed in 14 evenings (non consecutive), 2 maby 3 hours a night. It is a simple turn based 3d board game, very similar to “Go” or “Reversi”. In this version you play against a computer AI (a really dumb one). I plan on posting a dev blog showing how the game progressed at the end of each evening, with code snips, but honestly I’d rather work on the last few milestones, like get save games, network play, and facebook integration all completed.

Unity3D is a developers dream

From the perspective of an experienced software engineer, this is one very powerful tool. The power comes from how producetive any individual can be, how “open” it is, in supporting lots of different media. Personally I have to give a big hats off to the scripting reference. Every function has at least one example. As an old unix hack who grew up on the original BSD “man” pages, code snippits are like O2, without them you can’t breathe, having lots of them makes you giddy and energized.

But you can’t say enough about the community.

Unity developers blog, they youtube, they twitter, they IRC. Specificlly Will Goldstone, and his video tutorials at learnmesilly.com.

Give it a whirl:

To Play:
Goal: “AQueme-ulate” as many purple cubes as you can. While the red cube player does the same.

How:

• You can “take” red cubes and turn then purple by “trapping” them between two of your purple cubes.
• Simply click a green blob to turn cubes purple (and place a new purple cube in the grid).  The green blobs show you places where you can “trap” red cubes. Any red cubes trapped by that new purple cube, in any direction, will turn purple.
• The red player (A really simple computer AI) will then take his turn. You will briefly see his moves, then it will be your turn again.
• The game starts with 8 cubes placed in the center of a floating play field. Purple player gets to start.

Notes:

• This play field is a 4 by 4 by 4 grid. (the playfield can be as big as I want, bigger boards are really boring)
• The game is over when one of the players can no longer move.
• You can rotate the grid using the A S D W keys, the arrow keys and by holding down the right mouse button
• you can zoom in and out using the Z X keys, or the mouse wheel.
• There is an extra thing you can do in the game, it is a bit of an easter egg. Take a good look above the game grid. No, the button on the table does not do a thing.
• For some reason this particular build will crash google when ran chrome on Vista

Credits:

• All programming, original art, and production by Talon
• Non original art thanks to the Unity3D dev team
• Sound design: Dugan Dolbier

But not all is roses

One thing I will say, as much as I enjoy using Unity3d, geeze it needs a debugger. 90% of the content in this game is generated on the fly from 3 or 4 base objects. Placing the orbs for the user to click on uses a very rudimentary  variant of the A* algorithm in 3 space (did I say Very rudimentary). I blew 3 evenings (that’s just about 20% of dev time for you producers out there keeping track)  just in debugging, finding things that would have taken a few min with a normal debugger.

There are lots of tricks you can do in Unity to use the editor as a debugger, but there is still no call stack viewer, runtime object browser, breakpoint setter etc. etc. Unity 3D does have a debug class that lets you print out stuff and set breakpoints, but as I had to explaine to  my wife:

it’s like wood schulpting,

only with a chainsaw,

at night,

in a dark room,

with only one window.

But you are wearing safety glasses,

and thick leather gloves

and a facemask, helmet,

nice comfie Dr. Martin’s workboots

but  the safety glasses are yellow tinted

So Hopefully the mono team, and/or the unity team will provide us all with some good debugging tools (gotta run on windows and MAC not just linux), or let us use the free MS Dev Studio tools or something like that.

I feel OK complaining about a tool I’ve been using for free, because I’m sold. I’m buying my copy tomorrow morning, and Hey, I still have 15 days left on my trial.