Game Development? Yeah, I’m going there.

Since I’ve recently been taking several classes in school to learn Adobe Flash inside and out, I’ve been bitten by a bug. I’ve tried to avoid it in recent years to really hone my web development skills, but I’m still being drawn to game development (Hey, even web developers need a hobby!). These classes have had me designing and coding simple web applications in Flash and the amount of homework is insane. But in spite of all of that, I still decided to download a game development tool called Unity and take it for a spin.

For the last 2 hours I’ve been completely thrashing the “Bootcamp” demo scene (I saved a copy of the original pre-built scene first). I know that sounds crazy, but it’s how I become acclimated to new (and sometimes intimidating) software. I dig in and play with it. I wreak havoc in the demo files. I replaced the rock textures and plastered random pictures on them. I squashed and stretched random objects. I dug into the assets to see how game objects were built. I looked at the comments in some of the scripts just to see what I could figure out.

Here’s the way it’s going down. I have the Indie Developer license for Unity. This gives me the ability to design games (which will certainly be all kinds of simple and terrible at first), which you’ll be able to play here on the site, in your browser. Doesn’t that sound like fun? No, but in all seriousness - I’m going through a beastly tutorial on building a platform game which covers a ton of material, so hopefully they won’t be THAT bad.

There is also Unity for iPhone, which is a version of the dev tool geared specifically for iPhone game development. That’s my next step. I’m going to chronicle as much of this new adventure as I can. I want to take you through going from being a newbie to becoming proficient at this. I’ll keep you all posted.