Warbreaking Point Weekly Round-up – April 18-25th

After a deserved Easter break together with my family, I’m now back on track with new mental energy for the Big Game Project. First of all, I have decided on a proper title for my game, which is “Warbreaking Point”. This was just something that I came up in my head while I was getting back from the Easter holiday.

Then, I’ll talk about what has also happened since the last post. Since that time, I’ve been looking into the Unity Asset Store for assets and useful technology for my game. So far I’ve found 2 technologies and 1 asset  pack that I will use for this project:

• Tile Based Map and Nav is a scripting tool that allows the creation of tiled grids (both square- and hexagon-based tiles), and some useful functionality that comes along with it; like simple path-finding for moving from one square to another. After looking into the source code and a couple of examples that was included with the purchase, I think this is going to work out great for my game. I will need to make some adaptations to the code that was included with this pack, but I don’t think that it is going to be too big of an issue, as it already has a good foundation of what I need going forward with my project.

• GoogleFu is an Unity editor extension that allows you to export data from Google Spreadsheets into Unity and access the data from there, with no need for internet connection once the spreadsheet is exported. This was the daily deal and the Unity Asset Store a few days back and I bought it because it could come in handy when I (hopefully) develop this game with a full team next year; as Google Spreadsheets are a good way of collaborating when several people are working on something together.

• Even when working alone, GoogleFu is also useful because it allows you to extract game variables (like a unit’s health, speed, attack damage and so forth) into an external file rather than hard-coding it into the game. As a general rule, you should never hard-code numbers into a game’s code, as you might want to use that number in several places in the code and if you had hard-coded it into the game, you’d had to change it in several places if you every decide to change it and you might very well miss one variables because of this. This also allows people to understand your code better, as the number 100 does not really tell what it is used for; while a variable named Unit_Infantry_Health is very informative, even for those how are not directly involved with your project.

• 300+ 2D Projectiles, Icons, and Items is a collection of various icons for usage in games. I bought this because it’s made by an Indie Developer whom I am personally a big fan of, and it had some useful stuff that I could use for the GUI in my game.