Wednesday, June 5, 2013

First steps as a game developer


At last many job interviews many crazy indie software projects i end up as a game developer.

Wow.. i'm excited with thrill.. not a normal job game Dev.. cool .. super cool.

In our company the gaming department is like a baby its start to stand its own stand. so i was an early bird (only in the company) also company expect me to catch a big fish in gaming industry called Unity 3D.

what ?

yes me to also asked that , what unity?
 
 Unity3d is one of the top 3d game engines available in the market. what make unity is so tempting is that, we can easily switch between mobile platforms like android and iphone same in PC and web versions.

first time i felt its cool that not consume much from college to allocate upstairs of brain. beacuse everthing in unity and gameing were new to me except x,y,z co-ordinates.
i spent weeks in-front of computer to understand how this unity software works. but it was hard to digest , because unity was born in apple so it have properties like apple software(KISS software).
 i was familer with  windows and linux, yet this new format is alien for me. more over coding and 3d objects are inter weaved. At first 3 weeks hard days.. so many sleepy hours. Then i got the thread, how to make a simple game. for that i was viewed hours of video tutorial.

Anyway at last i started my project they said "Tornado"- it should be a Particle effect and It will consume objects.. and talks about cut scenes ..

wait a minute !!

i had the same reaction, what the hell are these terms. then i learned particle systems are like fog,dust,magic effects etc.. wow cool.Cut scenes are the overview of story in between game play.
better.

i calculated a month to finish the game. And now i am writing this the Game is just enough to play.
Its been 9 moths :-D. its avialble on Play store with name Tornado trouble
link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zyqued.tornadotrouble

So what i learned in this 9 months are whatever the ideas we have. we need two important things in mind.. patience and product quality.

Every time i had sent prototypes to client, they felt this product is not like the way they think. at last i manged to make things like they want. i made PC and Webplayer version. they played it and said "ok,good port it into android'
i said "ok", i know in unity it will be easy. but reality is porting is easy. but running it on mobile was a horrible dream.the best quality Samsung Droid charge were slow for my simple silly game.
"yes .. his game need a Graphics card in mobile"-- my colleagues and friends teased me.
And i manged to run it on Andorid. yet it has lot of crashes and hard to play even in samsung S2.

because of increasing need to port in mobile platform. i destruct my own project and rebuild atleast 4 times in this time span. due to lack of vision, how the final product should be i took 4 times the normal game development.

Next thing about the viewers . i was not sure whether people try my game or not until i receive a lot of bad comments and crash reports in iphone and android. Only then i realize how important was game development and how people approach to games.

most people are looking for verity games to engage. games make us feel good, if games can provide thrill and fear we can get more relaxation.games help us to concentrate. i play counter strike when i feel less focus on my work.

most of the time i work like wired in. my headset will be connected to my ears sometimes they dont have a song yet i wear it. presence of mind and time keep was most challenging for a beginner.

anyway i think this is much for this post. i will update more Technical things in up coming posts.