First Global Game Jam (Entry 1)
I decided to participate in this year’s global game jam (http://globalgamejam.org/) which I’ll also be using as my submission for the game a month jam. I’m as green as it gets for game development so what I’m making won’t be incredible but it’s been a lot of fun for me. I’m making a tetris-like that has aspirations for some fun multiplayer aspects but my progress is slow and I’ll be lucky if I can make something that’s even fun to play alone. We’ll see how it goes :).
I started this dev journal late and was just taking notes in a google keep file so I’ll just transcribe that to start things off.
Danktris 2016-30-01 14:40
I've been really needing to start a game dev diary and I guess there's no time like the present.
I've been working on a tetris like game for about a week in earnest now. It's amazing how much you realize you don't know when you go from following tutorials to actually building something. I think I've changed how collision works 3 times now. The most recent revelation is my blocks don't actually need rigidbodies.
Previously I was using triggers (which require at least one of the objects to have a rigidbody) to detect when I landed on the floor, but then I realized I needed to detect walls to the left and right of the blocks. A simple trigger isn't going to help. Using tags on the walls could work but it would be weird to have a left_wall tag and a right_wall tag. I decided to go back and look at the rogue-like tutorial unity3d has (http://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/projects/2d-roguelike-tutorial) and saw that they were actually using raycasting before moving. Of course! I should look where I'm going before I go.
So now I'm converting the collision detection over to linecasting instead of triggers. I keep sitting down hoping to make progress but I often find I have to rework existing stuff quite a bit.
Danktris 2016-01-30 19:47
So I've got blocks working mostly (although they're still square). I moved on to making them clear a row when they are lined up and discovered something interesting. I assumed when you called Destroy on an object in Unity it was removed immediately. However, it is delayed (but within the same frame). This was causing some weirdness and blocks above weren't shifting down because they thought the block below them was still there. So weird!
Apparently there is a function called DestroyImmediate that you can use but it has a bunch of warnings about not actually doing that ha. So I guess I should think of something more clever to move pieces off of the board...