Unity3D Physics – Picking Up and Moving A Box (Fixing Bug in “Unfinished”)

“Unfinished – An Artist’s Lament” was released about two months ago. I said I planned to release a small update, not to add content, but to improve some of the problems with it. One of the worst bugs is properly game-breaking: if you use an ability to move a box to be able to jump on, there’s a good chance it will wall through the floor or glide through the walls as you move it. This bug is fixed now, and this article is to help explain what I did before, what I did now to fix it, and will hopefully help other developers doing something similar.

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“Unfinished – An Artist’s Lament” is coming August 4, 2015 (so here’s what it’s about)!

“Unfinished – An Artist’s Lament” was originally planned for a release on July 31, 2015 as of two weeks ago. I wasn’t certain I could keep this release date, so I didn’t advertise it too much… sure enough, animating the ending cutscene and adding certain features took a bit longer than I hoped. The current build was finished on July 31, but I moved the release date to Tuesday, August 4 to give the stores some time to prepare. Steam and IndieGameStand will host the game, and hopefully so will MacGameStore and WinGameStore.

To prepare you, this post provides a detailed rundown of the background of the game, from development to now, to guide you as to what to expect. I hope it helps.

"Unfinished - An Artist's Lament" is now finished!

“Unfinished – An Artist’s Lament” is now finished!

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Announcing My New Project: Unfinished

Sometime in January, I made a post that said…

 “I will have gameplay finished by April 2015, or so help me God I will shut down this site and my gamedev career forever!”

Well, April is almost over, and I’m announcing my next game project just in time. It feels appropriate that it happens to be “Unfinished.”

“Unfinished – An Artist’s Lament” is a hand-sketched 3D adventure game for Windows, Mac and Linux.  Control Sketch, an unfinished sketch wishing to know who it was supposed to be. The only clue is to follow a pencil that continues to draw in the distance, followed by an artist’s voice as he struggles to complete his work. To reach new areas, Sketch will find left-over drawings to use for new abilities throughout the journey. Featuring traditional animation in a 3D environment, a personal story, and an environment filled with scattered concept art by the developers from various projects. More information on http://unfinished.fromdustscratch.com .

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GDC 2015 – Unreal Engine 4 VS Unity 5

I shouldn’t be spending time writing more blog posts, but this was a big week for game developers big and small. GDC (Game Developer’s Conference) had some great announcements.

Oculus Rift still doesn’t have a set release date, although most sites state it will formally release before the end of 2015. And it better… plenty of competitors from Sony, HTC, and others are racing to beat it, and will release early 2016. I’m still excited for the opportunities of VR.

NVIDIA announced the greatest thing ever: an Android TV. Like the ones we’ve had for the last five years. Except it’s slightly higher quality, and they are using a high-powered mobile chip to encourage developers to port their last-gen games to Android with the new box. More importantly, they’ve announced a sort-of Netflix for films, which again kind of existed but still has opportunity for improvement. Imagine streaming games at high-quality purely based on your Internet connection rather than your computer’s own graphics card. The thing is, my mid-range-graphics card is much better than any Internet connection in my town. Regardless, I hope it works.

More importantly, Unreal Engine 4 is now outright free. It was already cheap at $19 a month (with an easy-to-quit subscription, so it was basically $19 for the whole engine), but now there’s no excuse to not give it a try. The only barrier is that standard percentage after you make more than $3000 profit. Also, a few weeks ago they announced a new grant program to give money to small developers to use their engine. At a time when Unity 5 and Source 2 are also released, it’s hard to say that Unreal isn’t worth at least looking at.

So I looked at it. As a experienced Unity developer, did I like Unreal? Well…

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New 2D Faces on 3D Characters – 2D Live Euclid

CES 2015 happened last week. Beautiful tvs, new laptops and tablets, a lot of car-tech… but I’m going to talk about an innovation from about a month ago that’s more up my alley.

Most of the posts on this blog makes it clear that I like 2D animation. My first game (which got Greenlit on Steam recently, I’ll talk about that more in a few weeks) is one of the first truly 3D games that has a hand-drawn character. I did this because I am annoyed that no one has really done that before. However, “Live2D” is a company that has been trying hard to make it easier for developers to do that, and so their latest effort, “Live2D Euclid,” comes closer than ever. Their website is available here: http://www.live2d.com/en/ , and a video of their latest technology can be seen here:

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