ERA – First week of production

This Monday Escape Reality Studios started producing the game Eternal Resonance: Area E.R.A;  a new type of MOBA/RTS hybrid. For more info on the studio as well as the project, please check out our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/EscapeRealityStudio

My roll in this project is primarily as a Unity programmer and secondarily as an assisting designer; Daniel Svensson is our lead Designer.

As Unity is a game development tool I have not worked with before; this first week has been quite slow. I have worked hard getting accustomed with the editor of Unity and researching how various programming tasks are best completed  using the Unity script setup.

The main artifact I have been working on this week is the champion; champions will be controlled by the MOBA players of the game, and will handle much like a League of Legends Champion or a Dota hero. I have set up a general champion class to which I can attach the various abilities the different champions will have. So far I have created basic abilities (eg. ranged bullet, mele strike, dash) for the first champion of the game: Copperman. I have also set up a Unity Isometric Camera that can follow the champion and can be moved using the mouse cursor. I have also made it so that the champion a player controls accepts the input from that player for activating abilities as well as moving to the location the player clicks.

This week the three programmers; me, Inge Olaisen and Henrik Andersson have also set down together to try to work on an overarching structure for the project. We have divided most of the game objects into actors (champions, minions, buildings) and spells (bullets, attack effects) so that we can create the general scripts that will handle the interactions between these.

Overall I’m happy that I have gotten some flow going even though I feel it is building very slowly due to the barriers of learning and mastering a new environment: Unity.