Before jumping into Unity 4.3, I honestly had no idea what to expect, since outside of music production I had never done anything related to game development before. I was talking with a (sometime) game developer friend and told him that if I can get a character moving around on screen within 3 to 6 months I’d be happy. Well, it only took about 3 to 6 hours. I’ve worked on a lot of other stuff since then, including entirely redoing the way I was handling movement and collisions… twice… but the fact still remains that I did get him moving pretty quickly. He still needs some work, but I’m content for now. The point is that things are happening much faster than I anticipated, and now I have my character walking and running, double jumping, switching gravity, etc. None of this is animated yet, so he is just kind of sliding around, but hey, the basic mechanics are there.
However, the more that I dug deeper into the (C#) code, the more that I became reminded of the fact that I haven’t actually had much experience with object-oriented programming. I’ve done the majority of my programming in PHP which, yes, is an object-oriented language, but I managed to do it for 13? years while mostly avoiding making my own classes, objects, etc. It seems like this would be a bad way to approach C# development in Unity, so I decided to take a little pause and focus a bit more on figuring out some of the basics of C# and object-oriented programming before pushing the game programming forward. So that is how I have spent the last few days, although I’ve also spent some time on small things such as getting used to the GUI class and such.
I also decided that I should organize better before moving forward, because my one massive Word document wasn’t cutting it, so I signed up for Trello and transferred everything from said document to a more dynamic format that works better for development ideas / issues / etc. It’s not a perfect solution, and it kind of bothers me that I have no way to back up anything I put in there, but it is simple and easy to use, so I’ll roll with it for now.
I think I feel a lot more comfortable moving forward now. Time to get back to making actual game stuff!
PS. I’m only referring to my character as “him” because right now I’m using a Mega Man sprite as a placeholder graphic. Once I add in actual characters I’d like to get gender options if feasible. But I won’t be making the art assets (I’ll be doing everything else, I just suck at art, know your weaknesses and such) so that will be up to the friend from above, an awesome pixel artist who has jumped on board the (loosely defined) project, as well as my girlfriend if she wants to do add in some sweet hand-drawn stuff.