I've done absolutly nothing

I noticed my last post was march 2009. Since then I've not gotten much done on m personal projects. I did ship a wii game, and the studio I work for is currently wrapping up another wii title.

I do have some free time now and then so I'm jumping back into Unity again. Mostly inspired by all the content coming out from the community and stuff I'm seeing on iPhone. Very exciting stuff. My casual games website is still going and we are close to showing of the avatar system created with Unity. Stay tuned for that.

In any case nobody is reading my blog so I'm just basically typing this for m own sake... hahah

Here's some stuff I intend to do

• learn unity
• learn some basic maya animation

Unity3D: PhysicMaterial

The first thing I wanted to learn was how to use the PhysicMaterial and here's what I've found out.

To make a new PhysicMaterial you:

1. Assets > Create > Physic Material
2. I assume you have at most a sphere. If you do then click on it and look in the inspector. Under Sphere Collider you can find a Material drop down. Select the Physic Material you just created
3. There's a bunch of values you can tune and I'll leave that to the individual to mess around with. You can also read more about it in the documents

Now to access it through script you simply do the following:

this.GetComponent(Collider).material.bouncyness = 0;

or

colider.material.bouncyness = 0;

You can now script these values anyway you like. I had some help from the people on the unity3d irc channel. Thanks!

that's it! Now you can setup a project and bounce some balls around. Oh the joy of unity!

Unity3d

So I've known about unity3d for awhile and I'm acutally working with a programmer on a unity project, but in 2009 I've decided to attempt my own personal projects with unity3d.

The idea is to go through some tutorials and try to create simple games. Currently I'm trying to figure out the physics material. I'll post more about my progress as I go along with some scripts.

Blogging on blogs

Ok it seems I couldn't get the subdomain I wanted.

finalboss
endboss
miniboss
bigboss

so I settled for bossenemy!

I was typing up this long (multi page) background about myself and where I worked but who really cares. So here's the short version....

Before I was a game designer I spent around 4 years testing video games. Testing games was the easiest job to get out of college :). I was also very driven outside of work and was involved in modding popular PC games and working on my own projects with programmers I met through game development forums. Looking back now the pivotal point of me getting into design was when I was offered a position to be a tools tester. This allowed me to get hands on experience with actual production level tools used at the studio. From there it was only under a year and I was out of test. In fact I didn't even get a design job at the studio I tested tools for. I was hired by another company to work as a level designer. However after only 6 months I was laid off due to restructuring at the company. From there I was rehired back as a designer from my previous employer :).

So what's going on now? I'm currently working full time and my off time is spent developing a website for the casual games community. I'll describe the site in more detail in my next blog post.