greetings kind sir, I am writing from the future where I am dead.
with the best of intentions we become the glorious dead.
I am writing from the future where I am dead and never finished my game, something that happens to us all.
I was the last one out the door of the house of Flash, no one remained when I finally packed up my shit and headed to Unity 2019.2.13f1, my address for the last three hundred hours. I should have left Flash years ago but I didn’t I made up excuses and stayed overly long. I loved Flash. if you are considering leaving Flash, make haste and don’t look back.
and make no mistake, in endless ways Unity shits upon Flash from a great height.
“If you are considering leaving Adobe Flash, do it, it sucks.”
how Unity handles transitions of puppet based characters blows my mind. it’s like if you showed some old guy who had been marooned on an island for twenty years your iphone and his brain would just explode and he’d say “and I thought I had already wasted my life on Flash Island, I feel like I have the opportunity to waste it all over again, thanks!”
I used to do animation transtions by hand in Flash, making sure different animations fed into each other well enough that it didn’t upset the eye too much. but in Unity you just hook your different clips up using the mechanim and it uses MAGIC (MATH) to transition between the animations, with a range of settings to fine tune things. in Flash it was basically “well I hope they don’t interrupt this cycle at frame 10 because the transition looks like trash around frame 10.. I guess I need a new transition from frame 10..”
so long actionscript, and thanks for all the flish.
I think 2D indie game development always starts with some boxes and the best of intentions (whereas 3D indie game development is drastically different, starting with a sphere). I had to become familiar with the basics of a new program and a new language, C#. I am a visualist (lol) first and a programmer only by necessity, the necessity being not having to talk to other programmers.
“C# is pronounced ‘see sharp’ but looks like ‘see pound’.”
as a dummy programmer it is my contention that the differences between programming languages are mainly syntax. if you can figure out how to reference things you’ll be writing the same crummy if statements in C# that you wrote in AS3. even today in 2019 you can google something that requires a simple line of code and find a forum post with a hundred lines of code to accomplish the same thing the right way. I will continue to believe results are more important in programming. I don’t care how you get there, just don’t catch the car on fire.
I had my unfinished Flash platform engine i had tinkered with for years and I had a new character I had developed for someone that never paid me. so I gave Soso her perfect new name and vowed she would become the star of a game I would create and release with great satisfaction upon Steam! I would feel so satisfied! mobile sucks! perhaps a year from now I’ll be writing a shitty game post mortem about “what went wrong” and why my Unity 2D platform game didn’t make any money. hmmm I wonder.
in my new Unity world I am striving to make the most out of the new system, utilizing the 2D Animation package (still in preview 2.2.1 at the time of this writing) which is a bone based system that can utilize meshes and IK. I soon fell into a deep deep IK hole which I still have not climbed out of. I am focused on creating a strong, reusable 2D character controller. I want the character to be reactive to the environment but always prioritize responsiveness.
“Hopefully along the way my game will look less and less shitty.”
consider this space a found object, a bit of debris detailing the way one person used up the remains of their life, never finishing a game that no one will ever play, but not to wax optimistic.
imagine finishing my Untitled Soso Game sometime in 2020. imagine finishing anything!
flexing on fools with my perfect IK.
hours so far in Unity developing Untitled Soso Game, 295