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My Most Anticipated Games From E3 2018

19/6/2018

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Hey there, Gamers and game Makers!

Another E3 has come and gone and this year was a stand out for me as there were so many great games announced. I decided I wanted to break down my most anticipated games from E3 and talk a bit about what I hope to see from them. So, let's jump right in!

#1 Fallout 76

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It's no secret that i am a huge Fallout fan and a big fan of how Bethesda craft their open world games. I've been largely a fan of Bethesda games because of how they focus on the single player experience. So, hearing that Fallout 76 is going to lean towards a multiplayer experience had me a little skeptical at first.
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My main fear being that it would no longer allow e to be the loan wanderer as has been the case in the past and perhaps now force me to play with groups of others when I may not want to. However, that does not seem to be the case. While you will be online, you have the option to just go and do your own thing. To explore the vast open world of West Virginia, discovering the mysteries of what has happened and fight all kinds of new creatures.
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With all that said, Fallout 76 is still clearly not a traditional Fallout game like we're used to. I don't think that's a bad thing. The studio want to try out new things but are still striving to maintain what people love about the games they make. While Fallout 76 may be a shift in a new direction for the series, It's one I'm very excited to play in and that's why Fallout 76 is my most anticipated game from E3 2018.


​#2 The Last of Us Part II

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The Last of Us is still one of my favorite narrative games of all time. So, as you can imagine, I was very excited to see more of The Last of Us Part II at E3 this year. We know the game picks up a not long after the events of the first game. While not much is known right now about the story, one thing we can be sure of is the characters have grown since the events of the first game. We also see the world is still a very unforgiving place with humans arguably a larger threat than the infected.
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The trailer and then the gameplay we've seen at E3 both show that this game ups the intensity and struggle for survival to a whole new level. I was full of adrenaline from simply watching. As always, Naughty Dog seem to be doing what they do best when it comes to developing a rich world with real, believable characters that don't just feel like a game mechanic but more like a breath of life to the games world. I'm very excited to get my hands on The last of Us Part II.


#3 ​Cyberpunk 2077

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This is one folks have been waiting a long time to get a look at. While the E3 trailer was a CG trailer and not one showing gameplay, the trailer does set the tone of the game and is a good indication that CD Projekt Red are at a point where they're confident to start showing the game behind closed doors to industry folks. It's a game I'm very excited to see in depth.


#4 The Elder Scrolls VI

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While we know nothing about The Elder Scrolls VI, I still wasn't really expecting there to be an announcement at E3 for the game. While the announce trailer for The Elder Scrolls VI is pretty much just a logo reveal, it does a few things. Much like the Cyberpunk trailer, it sets a tone for the game. It also lets us know that while there's still a lot of development left on the game, we know it's coming. We know the team have established the location of this game and have a clear vision going forward.


#5 Hitman 2

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I've loved the Hitman games for many years and while some have been hit and miss, the core of the game has always appealed to me. I love being placed in a world that gives me almost unlimited ways of going about my objective in rich detailed worlds. The last Hitman game did a wonderful job of redefining the games experience and I am very excited to see more of the new game.

Until next time!
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Opinion: Paying Speakers

7/6/2018

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Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers!

In this week's blog, I'm going to be talking a bit about my thoughts on something that has been cropping up a bit more as of late and that's the issue of should game developers be paid for speaking at events.

Now, this is not exactly that much of a black and white situation. It really depends a lot on the type of event and the topic as well as the speakers experience. For the majority of the time, I feel the speaker should be paid. For example, if you are running a for profit event and you reach out to a game developer asking them to speak at your event then yes you should be paying them. You are charging people money to come see said developer or a number of developers, so as they are part of the reason why people are attending then they should be paid accordingly.

There are exceptions to this however. For example, if you a running an event that is purely for charity, then I personally have no issue with speakers not being paid if the money is instead going to a good cause. Depending on the event, they may still cover your cost of travel but again, if it's for charity, I wouldn't mind covering my own travel.

The issue of assuming you don't pay speakers is something that has existed for quite some time here in Ireland. While I have spoken at events that paid their speakers and covered travel costs, for the most part speakers do not get paid. I've had a number of for profit events reach out to me asking me to speak for an hour or more with no intention of payment or of even covering the cost of travel across the country. Ireland may be a small place but trains still cost money and game developers still need to eat lunch last time I checked. I've heard plenty of times that the exposure is why you should do it for free and here's the thing, exposure is all well and good but if you're running a for profit event and you ask me to speak at it for over an hour with no intention of paying me then as far as I'm concerned, you don't value my time or the time of anyone else you ask to speak for free.

It's one thing if I see an event that I think is really cool and I reach out asking if they would be interested in having me speak at it. In that case I'm the one basically inviting myself to it so I'm ok with not being paid for it. At the end of the day, these for profit events are asking you to come in the hopes they ave enough content to sell more tickets. Making games is not easy and putting together a presentation that is both entertaining and informative to an audience is also not easy. It's important that you value your time because if you don't then none of this will change. We've seen the trend where it's expected of indie devs to release their games for free or practically nothing which has already had such a negative impact on the industry. Lets not see that happen with speaking events too. Ireland has a lot of problems with its game scene and a long way to go in terms of making it something more but for now if we can start by valuing our skills and our time to share those skills and experience, we might be able to start improving the industry here.

until next time.
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What I've Been Playing #5

7/6/2018

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Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers!

​This week, I'm going to talk a little bit about what I've been playing lately and that has mostly been God of War.
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When I started God of War, I wasn't entirely sure what to expect given that the game is going in a new direction. It didn't take long for the game to win me over. In fact the first introduction to the combat left me with a real sense of satisfaction. Being able to throw your axe and summon it back. A simple game mechanic that just feels so good and even makes you feel that bit more powerful.

The combat can be quite difficult at times but not in the sense of just being overpowered for the sake of making things difficult for you but more so you lost a battle because you weren't prepared for it. You need to pay attention to the armor you wear as well as your weapon upgrades. The first time I went up against one of the Valkyrie, I was killed in less than a minute. Simply because I thought I could go in brute force and defeat her that way. I had to carefully choose my armor and enchantments before facing her again and even with me at my best, it was a long difficult battle.
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The games open world at first felt small to me but the game is much larger than it appears at first with a great many locations and quests hidden throughout the world. The attention to detail in the world building and lore to support it is particularly great. It's well worth your while exploring the world at a slower pace rather than rushing through the story as you'll pick up on much more of the games lore but you'll also find more upgrades to better aid you on the main story.
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For me, what truly makes the new God of War great is its story telling and character development. The relationship we see build throughout the game between Kratos and Atreus is one of the best I've seen since the Last of Us with Joel and Ellie. There were moments when I both loved and hated what I saw in Atreus and times when I felt for Kratos. A God who for most of his existence has been defined by his rage now has to face the death of his wife, raising his son and trying to find a better way. One that breaks the cycle of violence and vengeance. Not so he can be a better God but, so he can be a better father.
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While I have finished the main story of the game which I found to be a wonderful experience, I'm far from finished with the game. There are more quests and many more secrets to uncover and I intend to find as many as i can.

Until next time!
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Platformer Tutorial: Reload on Death

29/5/2018

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Hey there, Gamers and game Makers!

In this week's blog, we're going to build on what we did last week where we made it so we could change scenes when we got to the end of our level. We're going to build on that by making a similar script that will reload the scene should you die by hitting a spike platform.

The main difference with this is that we aren't loading a scene by name exactly but rather reloading the currently active scene. So in other words, we don't need to make a bunch of these scripts or keep having to update scene names for it to work. It will simply reload the current scene. Let's get started.

As you can see, I've added a spike platfrom to my level and on that I've added a 2D box collider and set it to Is trigger. I've also once again created a new Tag in the project settings called reload and set the spikes tag to reload.
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Next, create a new C# script called ReloadLevel and open it in Mono Develop. This script is going to be very similar to our load level script from before. Start off by adding using UnityEngine.Scenemanagement to make use of that library in this script.
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Create a private void OntriggerEnter2D and set it's parameters to be a Collider2D and the tag reload. Now once again we'll be writing an if statement to check if the player collides with the object with the tag reload. If such a collision is detected we won't reload the scene by name like we did before for our change level script. We want to be able to use this script in any scene without having to edit it every time. So we'll have it reload the active scene by writing Scene scene = SceneManager.GetActiveScene(); SceneManager.LoadScene(scene.name);
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Save the script and now add it as a component to the spikes object.
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If you run the scene now and let the player fall onto the spikes, you'll see the scene get's reloaded. Try using this script on an object in another scene and you should see that it still works.

Until next time!
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Platformer Tutorial: Level Change

24/5/2018

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Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers!

In this week's blog, we're going to continue our Platformer Tutorial series by learning how to change levels. For example, you reach the end of one level and want to load the next.

To start off, I've created a second very basic scene as we'll actually need a second scene to change to in order to see our script working. I've also added the new scene to the build settings so that it will load.
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As you can see in our original scene, I've added a sign or checkpoint of sorts. This will act as our end of level marker. The idea being that once the player reaches this point, the next level will load.
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The next thing we want to do is create a new tag for our marker. I've decided to call mine loadLevel but it can be whatever you want. While you're setting tags, make sure the player is set to the player tag while you're at it.
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Next create a new C# script called ChangeLevel and open it in Mono Develop. As we're going to be changing scenes, we'll need to import the SceneManagement library. To do this, go up to the top of your script and under the using UnityEngine; line type using UnityEngine.SceneManagement;
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Now we want to create a public string called levelName. The reason for this is so we don't have to hard code the name of our level which if we did would mean we would need a script for every single level change which wouldn't be practical. This variable will allow us to enter the name of the level we want to load in the unity editor.

Now we'll create a private void of OnTriggerEnter2D. It's very important you don't forget to add the 2D as we are working on a 2D game. Otherwise unity will assume you are looking for the trigger event of a 3D object. In the parameters field type, Collider2D and the tag you assigned your marker. In my case it's loadLevel.

We then need an if statement to actually check for the collision. We're going to use the CompareTag method to compare the loadLevel tag to that of the player. If the marker detects a collision from an object with the player tag, then load the scene. Otherwise it's simply ignored.
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Save your script and back in the Unity editor assign the script to your marker. Give the marker a 2D collider and set it to is trigger. Type in the name of the scene you want to load in the Level Name field of the script component. Save your scene changes and now if you play it you should be able to collide with the marker and load the next scene.
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Until next time!
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Platformer Tutorial: One Way Platforms

14/5/2018

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Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers!

In this week's blog, we'll continue our basic platformer tutorial series by looking at how to make a one way platform that allows the player to jump onto it from below and then stay on top of the platform. Let's get started!

As you can see, I still have my scene from the last tutorial set up. The only difference is I've added another platform that's a different color. Right now this platform acts exactly the same as the others.
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The first thing I'm going to want to do is to select my new platform and add a new component to it called a Platform Effector 2D. After you have added the component, go up to your Box Collider 2D component and tick the used by Effector check box.
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That blue dome you see is what determines where collision will be detected. As you can see, anything below the dome (below the platform) is ignored meaning we can jump from below and land on top of the platform where collision detection will kick in. You may need to adjust the radius and angle of your Effector depending on your platform.

If you play the scene right now, you'll be able to jump from below and land on top of the platform. This works as you'd imagine but what if I want the player to be able to get back down? The collision is now active and I can't fall off the platform unless I go to either side and jump off. So, how can I make it so I can have the platform "drop" me? What we basically do is have the collision detection dome of the Effector rotate by 180 degrees on a key press. To do this, we need to create a script to modify it.

I'm gong to start by creating a new C# script called OneWayFlip and open it in Mono Develop.
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You can start be deleting everything i have highlighted in the default script.
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Start off by creating a private variable of type PlatformEffector2D and call it myEffector. Then create your start method and in the body of the method set myEffector equal to GetComponent and supply the PlatformEffector2D to it.
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Now in my Update function, I'm going to create two if statements. the first is going to check if the player presses the down arrow key while on the platform. If they do the offset is rotated by 180 degrees allowing you to fall back down. Now the problem here is because we have set the offset to 180, we can no longer jump back up. So we use the second if statement to check if the jump key (in our case space) has been pressed indicating a jump which will then change the offset back to zero.
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Now, back in the Unity editor drag the script onto the platform to add it. If you play the scene now, you'll be able to jump up onto the platform and fall off of it by pressing the down arrow.
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That does it for this week's part of the basic platformer tutorial. As always, feel free to get in touch if you have any questions or suggestions.

Until next time!
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Platformer Tutorial: Character Controller

7/5/2018

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Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers!

Welcome to the first in our Making a Basic Platformer Series. This tutorial series aims to give a basic introduction to the elements needed for a platformer game and how to make them. We're going to start by making our character controller that will allow us to move the player and make them jump. Let's get started.

As you can see below, I already have a very basic scene set up with my platforms and a weird little rectangle ghost dude that I made in Photoshop in a few seconds. Other than the sprites being placed in the scene there is no other set up done yet.
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Ok, so the first thing  we want to do is create a new C# script and open it in Mono Develop. This is going to be our character controller script and I'm going to name it as such.
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You can go ahead and delete everything I've highlighted in the default script.
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I'm going to start off by declaring some of the variables I'll need. I'm creating a private Rigidbody2D variable called RigBod that will be used as part of the 2D physics our character controller will have to make use of later. Next, I'm going to create three floats. JumpHeight which we will use as you may have guessed to control how high the player jumps. playerSpeed to control the speed of our player and a private float called playerInput which we will use to detect if the player is using the movement keys (arrow keys)
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I'm now going to add a line in our start function that allows us to manipulate our players rigidbody via script.
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Ok, on to the actual movement itself. We're going to start off by getting our player to move left and right. I do this by creating an update function called FixedUpdate that will set my playerInput variable equal to a get axis input. This simply checks if the player is pressing either the left or right arrow keys. 

However, this does not actually move our player. We now need to set the velocity of our rigidbody. We also need to make sure we do not affect the Y axis with this particular input so at the end we simply say RigBod.velocity.y.
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Once this is done, we can return to the Unity editor and actually apply this script to our player character and set some values. I'm going to start off by setting the speed to about 30 for now. We also need to add our Rigidbody 2D component to our player here. After doing so, make sure you tick the Freeze Rotation checkbox under constraints. We also need to add a 2D collider so that our player doesn't just pass through everything. Don't forget to assign colliders to the actual platforms themselves otherwise you might as well be jumping on a cloud.
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If you play the scene now, you'll see that you'll be able to move the player left and right. However, you'll notice that the player is always facing the same direction. Not exactly the best if you want to move in both directions and have it look good. We'll use a little trick that will allow us to flip the sprite depending on which direction we want to move. Head back into the script.

First off, create a new bool variable called lookingRight and set it to true by default. Now, let's create a method that will actually flip the player sprite. Call it flipSprite and in the body of the method, set lookingRight to be equal to !lookingRight(equal to not lookingRight). Create a Vector3 Scaler and set it equal to the players local scale. This is the X,Y and Z values of the player at a given point in time in the scene. We then take the scaler of X and multiply it by -1. We thwn set the local transform equal to the Scaler. This method basically looks at the X value of the players transform when turning left. If the X value is 2 while facing right, to flip the sprite on the X axis we change this to -2.

​This is all well and good but we still need to be able to check if we need this function and when to actually call it. In our FixedUpdate, add an if statement that checks if our lookingRight variable is equal to false and our playerInput is greater than zero. Basically this is checking if we are moving to the left. We then use the flipSprite(); method we created to do as you imagine and flip the sprite. We apply the same logic for turning right with an else if statement.
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If you play the scene now, you'll see the sprite flips to face the direction you are moving in. Ok next up, we want to make our character jump. It wouldn't be much of a platformer if he didn't jump. We're first off going to need some new variables for this. 

I'm first going to create a private bool called onPlatform which I will be using to tell if the player is actually standing on a platform. For this to work, we need something on the player that can be used to tell if the player is actually on the platform. Before we get to that, let's add the remaining variables needed. A public transform to check for a platform, a float to check radius and a LayerMask to determine what is a platform.

Back down in our FixedUpdate, we're going to set our onPlatform variable equal to Physics2D.overlapCircle. We need to tell it where to generate the circle and since we want this to be at the base of the player, we'll provide it with the platformCheck variable with .position. We then need to check the radius, so we'll provide that variable as an argument too and finally provide the LayerMask to determine the platform.
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Back in the Unity editor, we'll need to create an empty game object to place at the base of the player. Make it a child of the player object and place it at the base of the player.The circle will now appear at this position. Make sure you assign that empty game object to the platform check component of the script in the editor. Give the radius an appropriate value. I'll use 0.2 for now.
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In the Layers and Tags section of the editor you will need to create a layer that can be used to identify what a platform is. Once you have done so, apply this layer to all of your platforms.
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Ok, time to head back into our script to finally get the player jumping. Start by creating an int variable called jumps. Then create an update method that will contain an if statement that will check if the player has pressed the space bar. What we are doing here is basically checking if the space bar has been pressed while you are on a platform. If so, once you jump we decrease the number of jumps you have so that you can't just keep jumping in mid-air forever. You can assign different values for the jump height, number of jumps and force in the inspector now.
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If you play the scene now, you'll be able to jump around. Adjust your settings in the inspector until you get a jump that feels right for you. Finally, we are going to improve the overall smoothness of our players movement by preventing them from getting stuck on platforms. To do this, we will create a 2D physics material. Once you do this, set its friction to zero. Then assign this material to the players rigid body component.
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Play the scene again and you should finally have a smooth playable 2D character controller. That does it for the first part of this tutorial series on making a basic 2D platformer. As always, feel free to get in touch if you have any comments or suggestions.

Until next time!
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Current Status #2

3/5/2018

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Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers!

It's been a while since I've done a update blog on what I'm doing since Hide The Body released. Well, since Hide The Body released on Steam and other platforms, my time has been divided between providing updates and new content for the game as well as finishing off year 1 of college as a mature student.

Now that college is out of the way for the summer, I've more time to focus on the next project. The next two projects to be exact. I'm currently in pre-production on both and as a result, I can't say much about them right now. What I will say is that I'm very happy with the unique concepts of both. I think they'll be something quite interesting given time.

I mentioned some time back that I'm also writhing a book related to Game Dev. I've still been chipping away at this but as you can imagine, college takes up a lot of time. I aim to cover a lot more ground on this over the next few months. In relation to the teaching of Game Dev material, I'm considering creating an online course for an introduction to Game Design/Development. The idea being that it will be more accessible than workshops you would have to sign up to and travel to. It also would be more affordable for those interested in it.

The next tutorial series on the blog will kick off next week. This will be a basic tutorial on creating a platformer game in Unity 3D.

That about does it for updates. Until next time!
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Next Tutorial Series

18/4/2018

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Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers!

This week's blog is a quick update about the tutorial series. The introduction to C# series seemed to go down very well so, I've decided I'll do another series with C# but I'll base it around building a game. I'm thinking it'll be a platformer.

As for tutorial series after that, I want to get a feel from you guys on what you might like me to cover. So, I'm putting a poll down below of a few topics and whichever one gets the most votes will be the next series I do after the Platformer one. If there's something other than what's on the poll, let me know below.

    Tutorial Poll

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C# Beginners Tutorial: Loops

11/4/2018

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Hey there,Gamers and Game Makers!

Welcome back to the introduction to C# series. In this, the final post of introduction tutorials, we're going to take a look at loops.

So, we use loops when we want to execute a section of code multiple times as long as it continues to meet a certain condition.

​For this example, I'm going to use our script from the Arrays tutorial as seen below.
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Ok, I want to print the contents of my array but I don't want to write a print command for each one as that's just time consuming and just not good practice for coding. Since I know the size of my array, I can use a For Loop to run through the array and print out each name up until it reaches the last index of the array.

To do this I need a variable called index to keep track of the position of the array. Now, I don't have to declare this new variable up with  my other variables. I can simply declare it within my for loop and initialize it in the loop also. It'll still work if I declare the index variable as I normally do with my other variables. The syntax of my loop would change slightly.

the syntax for my for loop is as follows:
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I start off my for loop simply by typing the word "for" followed by a set of brackets. Inside the brackets, I declare my index variable and assign it a value of zero. I then set the for loops condition which in this case is index < 4. This means, as long as the index value is less than 4, the for loop will continue to execute. I follow this with index ++. This is our exit condition. This increments the value of index as long as it is still less than 4. Once the value of index reaches 4, the for loop knows it should no longer execute.

Inside the body of our for loop, we can put what ever code we want to run. It's very much like how we did it for our If Statements. Since we want to print each name in the array without using multiple print commands, what we do is type our print command once and inside the brackets, type the name of our array followed by square brackets. Inside the square brackets we type our variable index. What this does is print the name that corresponds to the index position that is currently the value of the index variable.
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As you can see, when we run the script all the names of the array get printed even though we only have one print command. Ok, let's take a look at a While Loop. A while loop works similarly to that of a for loop but we can use a while loop in cases where we don't know the number of times we need it to run. Now, I'll still use the array example so we do actually know the number of times it's going to run.

The syntax for a while loop is as follows:
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As you can see with the while loop, I've declared my index variable as I normally would at the top and inside my while loop I've simply put the loops condition which is index less than 4. In the main body of the loop I still have my print command with the array name and index variable inside the print command but I've moved my exit condition down into the body of the loop. This means the index will increment after each printout until it reaches 4 at which point the loop will know not to execute anymore.
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Once again, when we run the script we can see all the names of the array have been printed out using just the one print statement. Loops are a great way of running multiple calculations without having to clutter your script with excess code.

That does it for this short introduction to C# series. I hope you've found it helpful and I plan to start another series soon that will expand upon this and dive into making more complex and fun projects.

Until next time!
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