Introductions and a Learned Lesson
Hi I’m Jack and I’m still trying to be a game developer. I’m working to build out a portfolio to work in the games industry. I will be updating this blog and regularly publishing the content to my site kobaltbox.com.
I set out to make .FLO (name still kind of TBD). When applying for a junior gameplay programming position. I was asked to forward my portfolio of work for them to look at and I as look upon my kingdom of half finished game assets I realised something had to be done.
Most often when I sit down to work on something I try to recreate how it looks in my head and that will involve some beautiful and intricate 3D asset and that’s where I would start. You might not be surprised to know that alongside some scribblings in my notebook that is as far as that idea would make it. So as a challenge to myself I have set out to make and FINISH a game, without more effort than is absolutely neccesary when it comes to the visual assets.
Enter .FLO, which is for starters is a 2D game which is outside of my usual 3D zone of procrastination. This will make programming the gameplay a lot simpler and I can go another day pretending to understand quaternions and other such 3D vector maths more than I have to.
Additionally a lot of the the ‘art’ that is present is just standard unity sprites. For instance the players current health is a series of square sprites with attached sprite masks. These masks are scaled to affect the visible size of the players health sprite. The changing of the players health is wrapped in a function to update the graphic and the game state with one call.
So at this point in time in terms of assets that I have created for this game I think the total is… 2? I made the backdrop for the game stage in GIMP in around 10 minutes and I indulged myself making the loading animation in Blender one afternoon. But besides that I have been rather good. Focusing on the gameplay above all. It’s early days but I’m happy with the progress and the feeling of progress is rather refreshing.
The complete unity project is available on the Kobalt Box Github and a version is playable in your browser at kobaltbox.com.