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.
