Back to the swing of things

Srsly.

Evening, world wide web!

I love vacation.  I think vacation is the best thing ever.  It's even better than deep dish pizza.  And if you know me, you know I love that stuff.

Pic Unrelated.

But as much as I love sleeping in and stuffing my face (Aka vacation and being home) I have to be productive and stick with the rhythm of programming life.  So what have I done?  Nothing special or remarkable, just have kindof/sortof kept the ball rolling.

I created a very basic first build for my Zombie Yoga team, and I've received my very first ever Kinect (Bought refurbished off of amazon b/c I'm lazy and cheap like that) which means I get to start working with David on putting the Kinect to good use in our game!

We are building the game in the Unity game engine, which is a cross-platform development engine (literally, it will create games for mac, PC [perhaps ubuntu, but I'm speaking out of my butt right now] iOS, android and, if you pay big bucks, Xbox arcade, which is what we are currently banking on)

speshul tree for speshul kevin

Unity is, admittedly, really to use in a very very scary way.  For programmers one of the most important things they beat into our stereotypically-socially-awkward and stereotypically-glasses-wearing faces (I don't actually have glasses... yet, no comment on the social aspect of my life) is that all of your variables should be private unless you have a very good reason to make them public.

For those of you who have no idea what I mean by public or private, in code when you declare an instance of an object, or set up the foundation for an object in code, you have the choice to make your variables either accessible to the entire program (public) or to just that object and other objects of the same type (private).

If you make your variables, or the stuff that holds all the information in your object like health, or id number, or rank, etc. public then anyone anywhere who uses your code can suddenly get in and mess with your variables in ways you didn't intend.  If that was still too programmer-y for you, then the simple way of saying it is making a variable public is a very bad thing to do, and can break your code if other people decide to mess with stuff.

However, in Unity where everything (or almost everything) is based on drag-and-drop functionality and someway, somehow, everything has access to everything else, making your variables public is one of the only ways you can access those variables in the normal Unity editor.  The core game logic, such as the asset loading, using, rendering, and the game loops are all taken away from the control of the programmer (at least from what I can tell at this point) so where I would usually be able to pass variables to new objects upon creation (avoiding having to use public variables) in Unity when I drag and drop something into the scene the global set up is taken away from me, the instance pre-exists any commands that I'm used to being able to use during a game, so to rectify the situation I make variables public so that I can tweak their settings in the Unity Editor.

It gives me goosebumps thinking about how everything in Unity can just access everything else.  It's creepy for me as a programmer.  Then again I'm not programming wizard, others may see it differently, but let me use the following metaphor to describe how comfortable I am with Unity: I see unity as a very large and powerful rifle that descended from heaven to my lap during the zombie apocalypse that has one little flaw in it: every so often it fires a bullet that is secretly a tiny boomerang that comes back straight at you.

Aside from the fun I've been having with a full-fledged game editor, I've gotten back to work a little bit on my own stuff. David and I will be re-hauling what small fragment of a 2D engine I have now, but I'm determined to finish off at least one game with what I have (which I now see as an ugly mess of code, but that's what any programmer would see when he revisits a project he didn't properly comment/document)

And in that regard I've made a little bit of progress.

I've got a bunch of different buildings (see blue planet) and spaceship types up, now I just need to tweak, smooth, and slap a HUD onto this baby and see if I can get it on Xbox Live Arcade.  This is my pet project for the winter break, aside from Zombie Yoga.

I have all the necessary skill and knowledge to finish this game, it's just finding the time to put into it, I believe.
It's nothing big, but it'd be one small step for Kevin, one giant leap for... Kevin.  First game to be completed in, what, 5-6 years?!
Hope I didn't just jinx myself.

Cuz' all white whales look alike, right Ahab?  It's allllll about skin color with that dude....

Flowers, anyone?

- Kev