We’ve started development of our next game, which means R&D time for me… yay! the best part!
After weeks of patient debugging, tuning and optimizing Besmashed, it feels good to be playing with Unity for what it does best: prototyping.
No more polished code and pixel-perfect GUI layouts: time for dirty 1-hour/day projects to get a feel of what we can squeeze out of the engine.

So while toying with the Terrain Engine, I came across Fractscape (a Unity-made terrain tool), which got me thinking of procedurally painting/terraforming the terrain, and other geekeries… then Chris came in, one thing lead to the other and bam, I find myself doing a pong… with the Terrain Engine.

Not that I’m that obsessed with pong (or am I?), it’s just the “hello world” of gaming. Anyway, here goes…
(click to activate)

© Gamepulp 2007 – Created with Unity »

Please note:

• this demo needs the Unity plugin to run -don’t worry, if you haven’t got it yet it will auto-install smoothly.
• on Windows, the textures don’t move, only the heights… works fine on Mac though… maybe that because I’m using unsupported methods?
  The cool thing: I don’t care ! ah, the joy of prototyping…

I’m playing my friend Bob online. He chose Minerva, the witch, and I chose the robot.
He’s more experienced than me (this is my first time online, I only played the computer before) so he setup the match for us: the ball is rather fast but so are the characters. Also, we start with more lifes than usual, more crates, and he chose one of his item presets, but didn’t tell me what it was.

(continue reading…)

I’m playing the last level of the Quest mode, against Krog, the ultimate boss.
I’ve been trying to beat him several times, he’s tough! But this time I chose to play Duvna: with her fairy power, she can freeze her opponent, and I intend to use this to my advantage.

The computer just scored a goal. The ball is on my side, after the 3-seconds countdown it will be shot towards him, so I take a deep breath and consider my status.

The HUD shows that I only have 2 lives left out of my initial 10. Krog has got 5 left, but he started with 15 (damn boss!).
So overall I scored 10 times, and he only 8: if I keep up my pace I can make it, but I’m only allowed one more mistake!

(continue reading…)