A Writer's journey into game development

Probably the best feature in the upcoming Unity3d 5.4 is the new cinematic edition tool. Don't know if there is something else, do you? Honestly, I don't care. Even when Unity's  largest user base are indie developers, a few people are using it for more complex titles. And, indie or not, I think that a cinematic tool that can be useful at any moment. Not sure how will I get it (official site is unreachable from my country) when it is released, but definitely, I will.

Maybe it is because I started following E3 conferences recently: since last year, but I have the impression that this year is boring. The conferences revisit the same games presented in 2015, and even games already launched, just to talk about minimal content releases. So far I have seen EA Play, a totally insipid presentation with gameplay videos composed of a frantic succession of planes, to make us think that Titanfall 2 multi player is fun, or show really very little gameplay of Battlefield 1. Bethesda E3 conference was not impressive neither, and Ubisoft was saved perhaps by South Park: The fractured but whole . They even needed a lot of people to jump to scenery to tell us how fun is Watch Dogs 2 . The only thing that changes from one year to another are the indie games under the umbrella of large studios and maybe a new title, the other 80% is a little variation of the previous E3. And that 20% not always make worth the time spent watching an hour of boring presentation. ...

No additional work lately, but I have kept working to fix old bugs. Yesterday, after a couple of DOTA matches (against bots, of course), I took a look at The Key of the World again. I had been struggling to solve an annoying and really old problem: the character animation was not triggered when it started to walk. What I couldn't achieve between 8:00 PM and 10:00 PM, I managed to solve it in 5 minutes at 12:00 PM. Obviously, bug solving rituals must be performed at that specific time. I should have used some black candles and human skulls too. My mistake was that  the method I used to detect if the NavigationMesh agent reached the destination coordinates was incorrect. There is no function in the class to do this, so you have to calculate it manually using Vector3.Distance(). The changes are already in the repo.

I havent been updating this blog lately, in part because lack of news, and also because, after all, there are just a couple of faithful readers. I had to stop working on the game demo to focus on finishing the third novel. Actually, I have worked very little on it, and much more in the fourth book. The final pages are always a problem for me, and I don't mean literally the final pages, but a missing part here and there (the end is already written). Anyway, progress is progress, even in the wrong book. This weekend I went back to coding and solved a bug that was annoying me in the inventory drag and drop. It was a login mistake I made, using GetComponentInChildren() instead of properly looking for the child gameobject and setting the image there. So, the image was not assigned correctly and I got a white square when tried to drag it. Also, I spent some time trying to figure out how to implement a node editor, like Mecanim, it will be useful for dialog editing. The docs about ...

This time with Deathtrack, a racing game. In Deathtrack you drive an armed car through some circuits, trying to beat your opponents (who are also armed). I was a real expert on this game, capable of winning with any car (there were 3 available) without upgrading anything, except for the engine, maybe. Yet, seems that age hinders my gaming abilities and now it is really hard for me to complete the track among the 2-3 first places. Please share, and like! And perhaps there will be another retro video in a couple of weeks.