The current state of play.

I’m afraid that this blog doesn’t start right at the beginning of my journey into creating the game, but begins a little way into the development. Not too far mind, so this post is here to bring us all up to speed. 

You can find the current version of my game here - where I have uploaded it to gamebucket.io and you can see for yourself the state of the game as it is.

You'll notice a number of things - the shoddiness for one, and the randomly placed rectangle that looks suspiciously like plasterboard for another (that is the placeholder for a pedestrian by the way, not an escapee from the building supplies shop).

Once you've got over the extremely basic nature of everything I hope that you'll notice the things that *do* work: the player can be controlled by the WASD keys (or the Keypad arrow keys!) and can even run with the help of shift!

You can go to the house entrance or the shop entrance and go into the building; you can even come out of these buildings again (I know, right? Amazingly exciting! No, really...!)

Press 'e' at the appropriate time and the inventory system even pops up! In fact, there are four inventory systems so far, one for the cart, one for the house, one for the shop and one for the player himself.

Most excitingly the inventories are persistent however many times you nip in and out of the shop! Go on, try it! Load up with stuff in the shop and try to fill the House inventory!

You might not find this exciting, but belieeeve me when you've popped down in the middle of the night to code in the solution that occurred to you in your sleep you'll understand!


You'll have to look for the house and the shop - the house doorway is a couple of doors down to the left, and the shop a few to the right of your start point. Stand near the houses by the right doorway and you should get a popup.

Please post this on... and share it... if you have any comments please pop them in the section below and I'm going to try to update this every couple of days, whenever I do any work worth mentioning to the game.


Toodle pip 'til then!


-Tom

Very Big Thanks

I do want to take a moment here to get some proper thanks out of the way.

A couple of months ago I was very new at programming, and thanks in part to Unity and in part to people that I will thank more thoroughly in this post what you see here is the very pinnacle of my achievements as a newly minted programmer.

So thanks in no small part to the Unity team as a whole for producing such an excellent package, and for the inventory system thanks to a YoutTuber called PiDi and his excellent tutorial...

...but most of what I have done here I have learned, as you can too, from the Learn To Code by Making Games - The Complete Unity Developers' Course on Udemy that Ben Tristem and Brice Fernandes made, and I cannot recommend it enough. In fact feel free to skip the next bit if you've not got a bucket handy as I am going to be a bit gushy about how great it is...

Before I started to do the course a few weeks ago my only experience of programming - besides a Character Sheet Generator for Rune Quest that I did about twenty years ago in Basic - was about half a book's worth of learning Java. I was pretty much at "Hello World" level.

The course though has taught me a huge, huge amount in a very short time and given me the confidence in my own abilities to embark on this project now, which might well not ever become an actual game for actual sale in any actually meaningful way, but is going to be a tremendous stepping stone in my longer term plan of learning how to code and develop software - not just games - and even be paid to do it somehow.

It is simply amazing how far I've come since the moment not so long ago that I first embarked on this adventure of learning to code; from my first tentative steps of remembering to place things *between* the curly brackets and remembering my semi-colons to thinking nothing of knocking up a new method and refactoring this into that file instead like some kind of coding ninja.

OK - a slight exaggeration - I have a huge, huge, *huge* way to go before being anything approaching an expert, but I can at least now look at code without that sense of wtf that I once had, and this course has given me the tools that I need to do what I can do and know where to look for the things that I can't, and better yet, understand the answers that I get.

So if you are on the course then pat yourself on the back - you have done the right thing and have excellent teachers!

If you're not, and want to learn to code, then what the hell are you waiting for! Excellent resources are there for you to learn, take that first step and you Will Not Regret it!