Looking back at 18 months of game dev

Looking back at the last 18 months of developing Delta Quandrant and all the things I have learned. I had to go out of my comfort zone quite a lot, but there where also moments of pure joy.

The most fun I had was learning about vertices, triangles and uv maps. I decided to create a tile map with one mesh, instead of individual objects or meshes for each tile / unit in the game. Also looking at making the tile map customizable or modifiable with cols and row values. The loop that generates all the triangles dynamically kept me up at night. Took me 3 whole days to get it working perfectly and figure out the different row offsets for each tile.

Seeing that I wanted to change the UVs of each block or triangle pair, no two tiles / blocks could share vertices. Each tile has its own 4 vertices and 2 triangles.

Other fun was learning about saving a game. Previously I played around with PlayerPrefs in Unity 3d, but that only saves the information in the registry. This game had a lot more data to store and I decided that I would have to learn another way of doing it. I didn't have a lot of money so, I tried some of the free save game assets on the asset store. Unfortunately or rather fortunately, they didn't work for me or was to complicated to use. Instead of trying to figure out another persons work, I decided to do it myself. So I played around with creating and loading a file with the System.IO.

Then I remember reading about Serialization. O what a big, intimidating and strange word!

Created a small class which is [Serializable] and converted it with
System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary and
binaryFormater.Serialize (filestream, instanceofclass);

Badda-bing badda-boom. I was so impressed with how easy it was and was cursing all the time I lost with trying to use other peoples free assets. But don't get me wrong, the assets store is an EPIC place, where I have happily spent my money.

NGUI helped saved me a lot of time, with creating the UI and sizing it to different screen resolutions. But with Unity 3Ds own newly improved UI, I am not sure about NGUI anymore. But more on that at a later date.

Space Scene Construction Kit helped me with my weakness which is graphics and art.

Particle Playground provides me with cool particle effects.

Fantasy Gui Pack was on a great special and I luckily decided to buy it. I used it as a template to create my sci-fi UI. Which helped immensely.

Then some others that I haven't really tried out yet like - Complete Physics Platformer Kit. Maybe I will do a quick review in the next month or so on all the assets I have purchased.

I am finished with Delta Quadrant now. Done mainly play testing and more balancing this week. It is finally there where I feel I can release it to everyone now.

Next week I will start uploading and distributing DQ to as many places as I possible can. I decided that $3 is a fair price to pay for the amount of content and play time you can get out of it. My main goal is to at least make the money back, that I have put in.