Category Archives: Unity

Ken Levine on NPR, “pixel painting” Unity, and the Unity 1-day Intensive

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A couple of interesting items popped up on my radar this week that I thought were worth sharing.

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First, Ken Levine, Creative Director at Irrational Games and the main creative mind behind “BioShock Infinite” gave a great interview on NPR’S “On Point”.  Highly recommended listening.

BioShock Infinite And The Future Of Gaming

Second, here’s a youtube video demonstrating “pixel painting” a Unity webplayer demo.  This video is a bit like a magician’s trick, in that not everything is as it seems, but nonetheless it’s a cool trick.

UnityIntensiveLogoFinally, I am presenting a 1-day Unity Intensive class, taking place on Sunday, April 14 in Vancouver at the very cool EXP Bar + Restaurant.  The day is essentially a crash course in 3D game development using C# and Unity.  For complete details, head over to the Eventbrite page.

That’s all, folks!

Unity 4 released!

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The day after I finally get around to installing the beta, Unity 4 is released!

Among the new features I’ve been really looking forward to are DirectX 11 rendering, the Mecanim animation system, and Linux builds.

And, judging from the extensive release notes, there’s a ton of new optimizations, improvements, and fixes.

Unity continues its unstoppable ascendancy towards global domination!!!

aMaze – Maze Generator for Unity

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aMaze is an easy to use maze generator for Unity, perfect for randomly generated levels, building interiors, or dungeons.

Features

  • Fast generation of “perfect” mazes (i.e. mazes with no inaccessible areas, no circular paths, and no open areas, with one path between any two points in the maze).
  • A single, easy to configure script dropped on a GameObject.
  • Mazes are created from Unity prefabs, and supports random selection of prefabs for easy theming (i.e. tile sets) and variation (within a theme/tile set).
  • Prefabs can be any size, and non-square.
  • Multiple mazes can be created within a single level/scene.
  • Mazes can be created/destroyed at run-time.
  • Mazes are statically batched after creation for efficient run-time rendering.

aMaze is available in the Unity Asset Store.

Below is a video tutorial showing how to use aMaze.

 

 

Unity: Best Practices & Peter Molyneux

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A couple of good Unity links crossed my radar this week.

The first comes from Renaud van Strydonck, programmer on one of VFS Game Design’s current student projects, Take My Hand.  Dev Mag has posted an excellent article, 50 Tips for Working with Unity (Best Practices), which contains tons of great little tips and tricks for Unity, from very simple things like how to keep your Scene Hierarchy organized, to code snippets for the best Singleton implementation in Unity I’ve seen so far.  Unity developers of all skill levels should check it out, there’s bound to be a new nugget or two there for anyone.

Second, Peter Molyneux (Fable, Dungeon Keeper, Black & White) shares his reasons for choosing Unity for the first game from his new post-Lionhead company, 22Cans.  The video below includes the complete keynote presentation from Unity CEO Dave Helgason at the Unite 2012 conference that was held in August.  Molyneux’s talk is summarized in this article on Pocket Gamer.

Many of the presentations from Unite 2012 are now available on the Unity site.

 

Unity Tutorial 3 – Improving the camera with a CameraController class

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In this video, we improve the simple camera from the previous videos, creating a camera that supports both a first person camera and a smooth follow third person chase camera.

The Unity package for this tutorial can be download from http://www.brenlynne.com/unitytutorials/UnityTutorial3-CameraControllerClass.unitypackage.

Unity Tutorial 2 – Jumping and running using CharacterController

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In this video, we use the CharacterController.Move() function, and add jumping and running to the basic player character navigation started in the last video.

The Unity package for this tutorial can be downloaded from http://www.brenlynne.com/unitytutorials/UnityTutorial2-BasicCharacterNavigation2.unitypackage.

Unity Tutorial 1 – Basic player character navigation using CharacterController

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I uploaded the first of what I hope/plan to be a series of video Unity Tutorials.

In this video, we implement basic player character navigation using a CharacterController Component, its SimpleMove() function, and a simple Camera for first or third person games.

The Unity package for this tutorial can be downloaded from http://www.brenlynne.com/unitytutorials/UnityTutorial1-BasicCharacterNavigation.unitypackage

Top Down Shooter Kit for Unity 3

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The Top Down Shooter Kit contains all the C# scripts you need to create top down shooter games using Unity! Source code is clear, well commented, and full of best pratices learned from years of game and Unity development experience! Get Unity and the Top Down Shooter Kit, and start making games you want to play!

You can play a demo of the Top Down Shooter Kit on Kongregate.

The Top Down Shooter Kit is available from:

The Unity Asset Store

GamePrefabs.com

Activeden.net

AdvancedRagdoll for Unity 3

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AdvancedRagdoll is a C# script that synchs standard Unity 3 ragdolls with animated meshes, allowing seamless transitions, both when creating a ragdoll from an animated mesh, and when blending from a ragdoll back to an animated mesh.

AdvancedRagdoll is available from:

The Unity Asset Store

GamePrefabs.com

Activeden.net

You can see a demo video of the AdvancedRagdoll in action here.