My first "game" made in Unity 3D

My youngest brother is currently studying Games Programming at university. The last time I spoke to him he was telling me about a project he had been given to make a game in Unity 3D. We talked for a while about ideas for the game and I tried to help with some inspiration.

I recently visited him and asked him how his project was going. He said he had been working on the project for a couple of weeks and showed me what he had made in Unity 3D

My mind was blown. The demo he showed me was in a highly playable state, had realistic physics, collisions, weapons, interactive objects, and the tutorial section was practically finished. All of this after such a short amount of time. He started showing me how Unity 3D worked and how he was writing C# scripts that were making buttons appear on the editor.

The last time I attempted any kind of game development would have been about 13 years ago messing around with Torque Game Engine and casually helping out on the Garage Games community project. I also wrote eScripts for Penultima Online, an early UO emulator. Looking at the C# code made me remember all the amazing things that happened when I was modding UO.

The pieces just started falling into place. The Ravensword:Shadowlands game that I was recently playing had been made in Unity 3D. This tool had suddenly unlocked the potential to allow anyone to develop their own games at home. I decided I was definitely going to grab the free version and try out some tutorials.

I spent the following day completing this tutorial to make a simple game. It was fairly straight forward to follow. I had a couple of compile errors but was able to resolve them fairly easily as they were mainly missing semicolons and missing brackets.

After finishing the tutorial I started experimenting and customising my game. I added a skybox, 3d models created in Blender and music. After adding the music I realised I needed to give the player a way to turn the music off if they didn't like my choice. This meant I had to learn a little bit about GUI, which again felt very familiar to hacking custom user interfaces in a Ultima Online client all those years ago.

Anyway, here is a link to My First "game" I have created in Unity 3D. Prior to making this game I had no knowledge of C# whatsoever. I definitely want to learn more about Unity 3D. I no longer work testing other peoples games but I see Unity as a very interesting new hobby and a way to continue creating digitally.

First Impressions of Ravensword : Shadowlands

I recently purchased Humble Bundle 9 for 63p which contained four games including Ravensword: Shadowlands.

I was very curious about this game as the video footage on the Humble page made it look very similar to the Elder Scrolls series. I'm a very big fan of Elder Scrolls games, they are deep and meaningful outstanding examples of what makes a RPG more than just a RPG. An Elder Scrolls game throws the player into an epic story line with fantastic open world exploration style game play.

Describing Ravensword: Shadowlands as being similar to an Elderscrolls game is actually a good thing. But when I looked at the Steam Community page it quickly became apparent that quite a few people that were playing Ravensword: Shadowlands didn't like it. A lot of them had tried playing it for around 10 minutes before giving up and posting on the Steam Community page about how terrible this game was.

Comments like these would certainly deter anyone considering parting with £11.99 to purchase the game directly from the Steam store however I wasn't put off as I already owned the game. Admittedly as it was part of my Humble Bundle it cost me less than 16p so I certainly wasn't going to complain about the price.

I found myself developing a morbid curiosity. What exactly is this game doing to make it so bad? I don't consider myself to be an average gamer. I worked as a games tester for many years I have been exposed to WAY more crap games than the average gamer will ever see in their life time. I like to think I possess an immunity to shit games and I was certain that this game could not possibly be any worse than Deep Silver's Ride to Hell.

I started the game and was presented with a little tutorial on how to hit enemies with a sword. Movement was done with WASD and controls similar to Elder Scrolls. Turns out I was the only survivor in a massive battle and when I woke up I got to customise my character. The first thing I noticed was that there is no option to be female. The player is forced to play as a male character. This disappointed me as I always play female characters in RPGs but I decided to press on. As I was unable to create my standard "selfie" character due to gender restraints I settled for a character that looked like Demon Santa instead.

I am given directions and told to go find a wizard called Lamil who lives in a forest. After leaving the house a friendly tutorial pop-up informed me how to open my map. Lamil's house was marked on the map just in case I hadn't bothered to read the quest text.

I started off with two weapons a bow and a sword. I figured I would try the bow first. This was a mistake which nearly resulted in death. I discovered that slowly walking backwards while shooting a wild boar in the face was the best way to mitigate damage from the boar however it was also the best way to get the attention of the rest of the boars close by and before I knew it 5 of them were attacking me. I managed to kill them but the fight was painfully close.

I found the wizard and he told me he wanted me to get him some water from a pool at the far end of a cave full of angry trolls. I then set off for the troll cave. Enroute I stumbled into a goblin. I tried to shoot him, he and his mate then killed me in two hits. I re-loaded and ran around the goblins this time and found the entrance to the troll cave.

In the troll cave I could see a troll in the distance. I tried shooting it. It ran towards me, swiped at me twice and killed me. I tried again, adopting the run backwards while shooting approach, again dead within seconds. I decided at this point that the bow and arrow was completely useless and swapped to the sword.

I was able to slash the troll about 2 - 3 times with the sword before he killed me and smashed my face into the ground. I found I had 3 unspent attribute points on my character sheet so I put them into strength to do more damage with my sword and the troll still wiped the floor with me. Frustration kicked in, what was I doing wrong?

I had been playing now for about 10 minutes and realised that I was at the point that had enraged so many gamers on the Steam community page.

I left the troll cave and focused my attention on the weaker Goblin Grunts outside the cave. While difficult to kill with the bow and arrow, they were much easier to kill with the sword. I went on a bit of a killing spree. They always dropped a small sum of gold and shield.

My first though was grab the gold, use it to buy some better equipment back in town. The shields will probably be worthless and too heavy to carry very many of them at once. I was totally wrong.

In Ravensword: Shadowlands my little demonoid Santa character was able to carry 34 Wooden Goblin Shields before becoming encumbered due to weight. The game uses a fast travel system like the Elder Scrolls games so dragging all the shields back to town to sell wasn't a problem. The NPCs were happy to pay 60 gold for each shield but annoyingly I was forced to sell them individually as the game didn't have a "sell all" button.

In a very short space of time I was able to harvest a lot of Wooden Goblin Shields from the infinitely respawning Goblin Grunts located just outside town. Wooden Goblin Shield sales paid for the best set of armor sold in town along with a much stronger sword made from white iron.

I was now able to slice through the troll cave like a hot knife through butter.

Working out how to get past the troll cave that caused so many other people to give up makes me feel glad that I didn't. So many games hold the player's hand these days and guide them along gently while spoon feeding them content. I think I'm going to keep playing this game. I want to find the Ravensword.

Things are growing well.

Earlier in the year I decided to have a go at growing some seeds and today, my first marigold flower has appeared! They have to stay inside for another 4 weeks until the danger of a final frost has totally passed but they seem to be thriving living near a radiator.

I'm growing marigolds as they are supposed to be a good companion plant to live near edible plants because they allegedly deter pests. Last year I grew some broccoli which got eaten alive by caterpillars. It was a relentless battle where I tried to do as much as I could by removing the caterpillar eggs from under the leaves but in the end the butterflies won. I'm hoping marigolds will help swing the odds in my favour this year.

I've also been growing herbs because I enjoy using them when I cook. The pots you can see on the windowsill contain Sage, Basil, Coriander and Dill. However, due to a little bit of a mix up with the seeds there are also two pots containing unidentified plants.

I believe these two pots germinated from a pound shop variety seed pack so I know they are herbs, I'm just not entirely sure what kind of herbs they are. I have tried google image searching but haven't been able to find an exact match. Maybe someone out there can identify them for me. If not, will just have to wait until they are bigger and then see how they taste :D

Mystery herb plant #1

Mystery herb plant #2

I planted some seeds outside too which have just started sprouting. Hopefully these tiny shoots will turn into red spring onions. They were planted February and after two months staring at nothing I was starting to think they wern't going to grow at all.

The large terracotta pot I grew potatoes in last year, this year has carrot seeds growing in it. They were planted about a month ago and have only made an appearance very recently.

Seed Potatoes are growing in a green sack this year and they are also starting to poke through.

What is this?

Recently, I've done a lot of reading on and around the subject of social media in a very short space of time. The main catalyst for suddenly devouring such a large quantity of material was receiving an invite to a job interview. This process started just over 2 weeks ago when I learned that I had secured an interview for a social media job. I already blog about various things in my life such as painting miniatures, making things with beads, luthiery and there was also that time I went a bit crazy and decided I was only going to blog in Japanese.

I've come to the realisation that each of these individual blogs, while serving very specific purposes, are only showcasing glimpses into a few of my hobbies and I want to write more. I want to write an honest personal account of topics that matter to me and my observations in life.

Google+ gives every post it's own direct URL so while technically it would be possible to dump the contents of my head directly into Google+ I'm still not sure if the vast majority of people I know actually pay any attention whatsoever to what is happening on Google+. It's obvious that a large number of people in my circles still have the default profile image and cover picture.

So I have created this personal blog and named it "Full Version Unlocked" which seemed a fitting name. Hopefully this will be my bridge between social media platforms and a long term solution for writing essay length statuses on Facebook and running out of characters on Twitter.