Unity

East Coast Game Conference 2015

I was able to speak at the East Coast Game Conference last week. It was a good time. I gave a talk on Unity 3D. The room was pretty full and I was able to meet quite a few folks afterwards. I always enjoy talking to people after my talks.

I was able to attend some good talks as well. I listened to Luis Cataldi, from Epic talk to students and those trying to get into the game industry. He had several great points. He said,

Good habits trump raw talent.

This is so true in almost every field. Talent is awesome, but many times it is about grit. It is about sticking with something and working it out. Figuring out what went wrong and what the problem was and then fixing it. It is about not giving up and continuing to move forward. It is nice when we can work smarter and not harder, but sometime we just need to dig in and work harder. And that is ok. In fact, usually that is much better than having all the talent in the world and not working that hard. So, if you aren’t the best developer in the world, or the best artist, writer or whatever … don’t worry – just work. Diligence pays off – every time.

He also said,

Do less, better. … Make an awesome broom closet, not a mediocre city.

Here, he was discussing creating portfolio work to present to companies to try and get a job. If you want a job in a game studio, chances are you will be working on some part of an engine, or creating some tool for the game developers to use, or you will be tasked with making the flooring of the buildings. These are all very limited in scope and require a great deal of domain knowledge. These types of game companies want someone who can spend time getting something done at a fantastic level. He also mentioned, that in regards to your portfolio, you are judged on your worst piece, not your best. So if there is one in question, it is best to leave it off. Only show your absolute best work.

I met up with Dave Voyles and David Crook, both Microsoft employees, and was able to enjoy a meal with them. There was great conversations and plenty of good food. I then headed back to put the finishing touches on my presentation. It felt a little awkward talking about Unity 3D in Epic’s backyard. I love both engines and am so jealous that these tools weren’t available 25+ years ago when I was getting started.Dinner with Dave Voyles (photographer) and David Crook

The keynote was presented by Mike Laidlaw, the Dragon Age Creative Director at Bioware. His talk was fantastic. I enjoy the Dragon Age series, but unfortunately, I hadn’t had the opportunity to play Inquisition yet. I’ve been working on getting my game development site off the ground and between that and consultant work, I’ve had very little game playing time. Still, it was great to hear him talk about the game.

I dropped in on David Voyle’s talk on WebGL. Unity is working on getting this to work, but there are still some missing pieces in many of the browsers. WebGL is still a great way to get your website to be able to utilize your GPU. If you haven’t taken any time to look at this great technology, spend some time to get to know it.

I had lunch with David Voyles and David Isbitski, formerly with Microsoft, currently with Amazon. After lunch, I was able to hear @thedavedev talk about in app purchases and a lot of support data that discussed best practices for monetizing apps.

I also attended a talk from David Crook where he gave an overview of Azure for game developers. I personally think Azure and Game Development go together like peanut butter and jelly.

I wrapped up the sessions I went to by attending a session on “Idle Games”. I had never even heard of the term. These are games that basically play themselves or require you to click to progress. It was fascinating hearing Anthony Pecorella, from Kongregate, talk about this new genre of games. He talked about games like AdVenture Capitalist 2014, Cookie Clicker, A Dark Room, Candy Box, Tap Titans, Bitcoin Billionaire, DripStat, and Swarm Simulator.

Overall, it was a great conference and I had a good time. This was the second time I’ve spoken at the East Coast Game Conference and I hope to go back next year.

Chad Carter Leave a comment

Valentines Day Game I Created for My Sweetie

I have recently switched from being a full-time employee from a company for the last decade and a half to running my own consultancy services company. It has been great so far. I’ve been able to focus on some of my passions like creating video games and creating content for folks to consume around video game creation.

But running your own business also comes with some challenges. Having a steady paycheck every two weeks for the last 20 years is comforting. Not knowing exactly where the next project will come from and how the next month’s bills will be paid takes a little bit of a mind shift. Due to this mind shift, I decided to make my wife a game instead of buying her a card. It was sort of a geeky thing to do, but my wife has come to expect the geeky ways I express myself.  (When we were in college, I’d send 3.5 floppy disks to her through the college mail system for her to run different applications I had made. These included instructions like, “on the DOS prompt enter iloveyou.exe”. Yes, she can’t say she didn’t know what she was getting into!)

The Valentines Day Game

Anyway, even though I haven’t changed my cheesy ways all that much in 20 years, the technology has. Unity 3D makes it really simple to get something going. I spent about 2 hours getting the Valentines Day game to work as I wanted to.

The game is simplistic and randomly puts candy inside of the 3 heart boxes. It plays one of 3 random songs when it starts and tapping on the flowers makes it switch songs. If you find the candy on the first try, you get 3 points. If you find it on the second try, you get 2 points. If you didn’t find it until the last box, you get no points and you get a strike. If you get three strikes the game is over. It also keeps track of the high score and updates the screen (and storage) if a high score is achieved during the gameplay.

The game won’t win any awards to be sure, but it was fun to do over the course of a couple of hours this past weekend.

If you haven’t tried out Unity yet, I’d highly suggest you give it a try. It is really easy to get into and after a little bit of a learning curve, you can be creating awesome games – even a Valentines Day game like this one.

The game in its current form is using a font that is only licensed for personal use and I’m using songs that I have rights to listen to, but not to redistribute.  So I’m not releasing the game’s source in it’s current state.

That being said, if getting your hands on this Valentines Day game is something that interests you, please let me know in the comments below. If I get 20 comments asking for the files, I’ll spend some time to rework the game with assets I can actually distribute and make it available to download. So if you want to see it, let me know (and let others know too so they can comment as well.)

Chad Carter 3 Comments

Game Development Contest – $28K Up For Grabs

Game Development Contest from Microsoft has $28,000 up for grabs!

Already have a game developed but it isn’t on Windows and Windows Phone?  Or are you thinking about making a game? You should check out the Windows Game Development Contest from Microsoft!

The contest started on January 21st, but applies to any games that were already published to the Windows Store or Windows Phone Store on or after January 1st. The deadline to submit your game and apply it to the DVLUP challenge is March 20th, 2015.

The game entries will be judged on the following:

Quality of Submission – 50%

Creativity – 30%

Technical Excellence – 20%

Get all the details on the Windows Game Development Contest

Windows Game Development Contest

Windows Game Development Contest

http://www.wpdevcenteroffers.com/home/contest

So if you’ve been wanting to get started in game development, but needed a little motivation, perhaps the cash prizes would entice you.

First Prize: $10K USD

Second Prize: $5K USD

Third Prize: $3K USD

10 Honorable Mention Prizes: $1K USD each

If you are just starting out, you may want to check out the webinar I gave on my game development tutorial site, devgame101.com. The webinar has been made available for a short time as a replay. If you are interested, you can sign up for the game development webinar replay.

Are you excited about this opportunity? If so, let me know in the comments below!

Chad Carter Leave a comment

Introduction to Game Design: What is a Game?

A fellow game developer, and friend of mine, Charles Humphrey, recently asked on Facebook:

What do you consider a game to be?

Video Games

His purpose, I believe in asking this, was to start a conversation around game design. What is fun? What is a game?

Game Design

I’ve been working on a talk I’ll be February 11th around Game Design.

Because of this, I’ve been re-reading two great books on game design:

The Art of Game Design – A Book of Lenses

Art of Game Design

Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping and Development

Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development

A lot of smart people have tried to define game.

“[A game is] an interactive structure of endogenous meaning that requires players to struggle toward a goal.”  – Greg Costikyan

Endogenous basically means, things that have value in the game, only have value in the game.

Another, more scientific, definition is

“Games are an exercise of voluntary control systems, in which there is a contest between powers, confined by rules in order to produce a disequilibrial outcome.” – Elliot Advedon and Brian Sutton-Smith

 

Here is a summarized statement about what a game is from the Art of Game Design:

Games are entered willfully, have goals, have conflicts, have rules, can be won or lost, are interactive, have challenge, can create their own internal value, engage players, are closed, formal systems, and are a problem-solving activity.

I think, this is why many developers like playing games. In general, we like solving problems.

Do you like playing games? If so, why do you like playing games?

Let me know in the comments below!

Chad Carter 1 Comment