Northwards of Roswell. Update 4

That sweet moment when your game starts to be playable. Designing missions is so cool! ^^

Hello everyone one more time :)

This update is the most important up to date. We finally managed to finish our first real prototype. It took longer than expected (it always takes longer than expected :P), but the most important thing is that it is here and you can try it.

This will be anyway a great opportunity to collect your feedback! We prepared a small proof of concept of our gameplay that you can play and tell us what you like or hate about it :)

Here, a cookie... I mean... armadillo. You know, for testing the demo :)

Unity 4.6 - Simple Tutorial, Health Bar and Damage Popup!

If you find yourself making a RPG or RTS game you will be in need of Health Bars and Damage Popups (floating text) for your units. With Unity 4.6 uGUI this is easier than ever before. However, there are some details that you can to take into account if you want to have the classic effect in your game, no matter the setup you are using.

The best news about this tutorial is that you won't even need a single asset to make a simple Health Bar or Damage Popup! This is how I implemented those in my project Northwards of Roswell and this is the result:

Fight, my minions... FIGHT! Muahahaha! >:D

Let's start already! :)

Northwards of Roswell. Update 3

Northwards of Roswell... The Movie? :)

After a lot of sweat, blood, tears and enormous amounts of self motivation, I am extremely happy to bring you the next update of Northwards of Roswell. I got really into the AI of the game and brought it to the next level with the implementation of the combat mechanics! At the moment, the combat follows the rules of traditional melee combat in 3D RTS games.

Why I spent so much time implementing this part of the game? First of all, I stopped to use the Rain Plugin. The behaviour trees didn't work for me. Sadly, the plugin is very ambitious and wants to be a all-in-all tool for your games. It proves to be useful in static situations but when you start to make complicated dynamic stuff and combine it with other systems you will need to dig into the superficial documentation they provide. Sooner or later you may find a blocking wall of errors and will decide to drop it off your project. :(

I also spent some amount of time exploring the latest Unity 4.6 Beta. I will definitively use the new gui and event system when implementing the GUI of the game. Finally I also struggled a bit trying to make a flexible enough unit system for the game based on prefabs.

The big family of hybrids in Northwards of Roswell.

Unity 4.6 - Simple Tutorial, new Events System and Raycasters!

Unity 4.6 is (almost) here! Everyone is talking about the new uGUI, the best thing that happened to Unity since the 2D native tools. I already tried the tools and I can say they are simple and awesome, but if you already had experience with nGUI you will see little new stuff in there.

Let's better talk about something else... the new Event System and Raycasters! :)

The new uGUI elements allow to create simple conection between them and other scripts in some sort of visual scripting. Good news are that they didn't limit it to only the new uGUI elements, but they expanded it to allow any unity component to use them, it the Canvas (Graphic Raycaster), 2D (Physics 2D Raycaster) or 3D world (Physics Raycaster).

Events and Raycasters will make the life easier of both programmers and designers.

Northwards of Roswell. Update 2

Welcome to Roswell. A land of opportunities... in Alien Science :)

This update will be short. I spent last two weeks working hard to integrate pathfinding and AI in Northwards of Roswell. It was mostly a matter of learning, but it is great to start to see the first results of it :D

In the road map of our prototype we will need enemies! In Northwards of Roswell, the basic enemies will be the local farmers. They are not too much of a threat, unless they come in the numbers.

Our friendly fellas lookin' to the sky.

Northwards of Roswell. Update 1

Hello everyone!

It has been quite some time before my last update. ETCorps tutorial is at the moment waiting for me to have more extra time. After I finished the second part, I realised that maybe a written guideline is not the more appropiate way of teaching... perhaps I will try with video tutorials in the future.

For the moment, I wanted to show the world that I haven't been idle and actually I have another project that I am working on :)

The name of my current project is Northwards of Roswell:

"The game about aliens on Earth, trying to find their way home." 

Lost doesn't really mean that they are poor, helpless and goodwilled creatures...

It is a real time strategy, 3D game for mobiles where will try to mix two of the best strategy games of the recent years: XCOM and FTL. I will not talk too much about the features of this ambitious project since it is so early in development that anything can change (and will change). :)

RTS Unity Tutorial Together. Part 2 - Top Level Game

Resources... we just need one... Zoltoids, Zoltoids, Zoltoids! :D

Hello every one and welcome to the second part of ETCorps! Today... Resources!

We will start to implement the most basic skeleton of the game. Since the game is about resource collecting and money, I decided to implement this first. Many things are still not definitive but there is already a lot to explain in what I did for this post.

Before we continue I want to make something clear. This is not a step by step tutorial targeted for people that don't know how to program or don't have basic knowledge of Unity. That doesn't mean that if you are that kind of person you should stop reading now. Please don't stop reading :)

The reason behind this decision is that there are already amazing tutorials for that and if I will be expending time on that the scope of the tutorial should be reduced. All in all, every time I will not explain something in detail I will try to add some reference to a tutorial that will explain that topic. If you find yourself lost, check this tutorials.

Let's Roll.

Here is the result of this tutorial, in this post we will talk about how to get here. From design decision to implementation. If you want you can download the full branch of this part of the tutorial in this repository.