A Writer's journey into game development

Or almost. Yesterday I had the possibility to fly a paraglide, thanks to an experienced pilot of our local club. We wanted to repeat today, but I have some unavoidable compromisses (not that I fear to repeat the flight). My english is rather limited to describe the experience. I will just repeat what a canadian pilot that lives here told me before taking off: You like flying, so you probably have dreamed of flying or floating in the air. This is the same . Quite accurate. Excepting for the shakes when wind blows. During 30-40  minutes we floated over the mountains, sharing a not so little piecde of sky with three other pilots: the canadian and two germans, who, I have to say, had incredible sails, even with winglets and airbags. Regrettably, I lost all the pictures and videos last night, when I was trying to copy them to PC. An unfortunate Shift+Del in the wrong place. But I will fly again soon. It was a pleasant event in a year that haven't been good for me. This is my last ...

Can somebody answer that for me? Most commercial engines (at least, the ones that matters) offer some full featured free version. They are oriented towards productivity. Free engines rarely allow developers to be as productive. They often have limitations. What do you think?

Yesterday I forced myself to forget about the stress and work a bit in fixing the third person camera system. I wanted to migrate the code to something controller independent , a single code that handles keyboard or controller. I succesfully implemented a basic prototype, but not having a controller to try it, I had to use  my joystick again. The results prove that I am in the right path, but no more than that. A joystick can not emulate a controller, or at least, that's what I think (at least, I am sure that the analogic stick can't be emulated). My experience with controllers is limited to less than an hour of use in my whole life, and was long time ago since last time I played with one. Can't remember if the cross button is analogic or 4 separate buttons (I guess it depends on the model), how they are reported, and many other issues. And buying one is out of the question, at least for a few months. Also, the new system introduces new factors, for example: what to do...

When I started the project I didn't expect to learn much from it. It s a simple 2D game, after all. But I was wrong. Seems that The Labyrinth of Knowledge will not only teach the players, but also the developer. A couple of weeks ago I had to rewrite the character movement system, when I finally found how to properly implement a virtual joystick. At the same time, I use the experience to fix the keyboard based input system and now it is multidevice. I tested it with my old joystick, as I don't have access to any other controller. It works! Of course, a joystick can't properly emulate a controller, but at least, I could test the movement. Also, I had to implement a chase algorithm for the Ignorance minions: the ghosts! I'm still polishing it, but works pretty much like the one in the original game. Unity has no path finding in 2D, A* is a bit complicated to implement and I wanted something basic. So far, the demo is almost complete, but a few graphics are still bl...