A couple months after getting laid off my first job, where I worked for almost a year, and liked it quite a bit… I’m finally delving into game development in my own free time! So I figure I might as well talk about it somewhere. This first post won’t be much. (In fact, I just wrote it up for my “Current Projects” page, before realizing it made more sense as a blog post.) But future posts may be more meaningful. Maybe.
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I’ve been messing with Unity of late, after learning that the next big version (4.3) is going to have native 2D support. As a non-artist, while I could technically program a 3D game from start to finish, I’m totally screwed on the art side. I can at least make functional art in 2D. Pixels are easy. At any rate, I decided to jump in now, to become familiar with Unity before 4.3 hits. I’m using an open-source 2D plugin called RagePixel. It’s fairly limited, but it’s serving me well in implementing one of the simpler ideas I’ve been thinking about lately, which is in turn serving me well in familiarizing myself with Unity. And that idea is… Chaining explosions!
Clicking on the screen spawns an explosion. That explosion causes other pieces on the level to either explode or split apart into smaller pieces with different properties. As of right now, it’s fairly basic, but that’s okay!
I’m thinking that this idea maybe works best as a sort of puzzle game, where the goal is to clear a map in as few clicks as possible. The only real problem I can see going down that angle is that I’m no expert in level design, and I can easily see myself making the game too easy or too difficult as a result.
The other path down which I could take this idea is more of an action high-score based game, where objects spawn at semi-random (or maybe even predetermined) intervals/points, and the goal is to chain together as many explosions as possible for higher combos. But don’t wait too long, or they’ll explode on their own, and any chains caused by self-explosions don’t count!
Obviously, it’s still super early, so who knows where it’ll go from here.
Click here to play the current working version! Warning (in case it wasn’t obvious): very early prototype.
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