Fizzball Development Blog #1

_I have to start off by saying what a wonderful fufilling experience it is developing games. It took me a long time to decide I wanted to make games because I hated every job I've ever had. I hated getting up every morning and going to work doing the same thing every day. Even in aircraft maintenance working on 737's and Airbus I hated how mundane and routine it was. This gave me a fear that if I got into developing games well then in turn over time I would hate that and hate playing them even though playing video games is one of my favourite things to do.  One day I decided to just go for it. I eventually figured I could never hate something I loved so much so I bit the bullet and signed up to the full time development course in Pulse College and haven't looked back since.

In the 9 months since I started I've learned so many new skills from 3d modelling, concept art with sketch up and photoshop, programming javascript to even sound design. It's been a rollercoaster of a ride in such a short time and has been one of the best decision I have ever made. From being around like minded people in my class to meeting industry professionals like the lads from Open Emotion Studios, Havok, bitSmith Games and many more. Owen Harris from bitSmith games was one of our lecturers and probably the guy I learned the most from. His lectures covered basic game development from board games to what makes AAA games good. He also covered the ins and outs of the industry and gave helpful tips on getting started. The tools we learned from him were Gamesalad and most importantly Unity, the latter being my weapon of choice for "Fizzball".

Fizzball is a basic physics based puzzle game where you get the ball from its start location to the sparkling spiral located somewhere in each level but instead of controlling the ball you control the level by rotating clockwise and anti-clockwise. The project we were issued by Owen was basically make a game in Unity with a "science theme". I figured physics was science so I was already on my way. I had already had the idea for the game in my head so I was good to go. I played alot of ClearCut games "Cado" on the iPhone which has a similar mechanic to mine with a very different art style which can be seen here (Cado Trailer) . Cado is possibly my favourite game on the iPhone and I recommend everyone download it now.

The very first snag I came accross when starting my prototype was the unity collisions. My sphere collider was constantly going through the mesh colliders. It seemed ok with the box colliders but what I discovered from various ways of research was the frames were moving faster than the ball. When explained to me I was thinking "this is madness, the ball is there, the wall is there, ball hit wall now. " Alas this was not the case, what I didn't understand was when something in the Unity engine moves it takes a frame makes it disapear and reapear in another location but to the naked eye it looks like a fluid movement. When I finally got my head around it I figured out the best solution was in the unity settings to increase the thickness of the skin of each object making it harder for the wall to simply pass through the object. This may not have been the best solution but it worked for me.

Once I got that down it was just a case of level design and coding in the triggers for win lose and lose rule. As this is my first real project that I have been working on myself i have to say I am really excited. It may not be the best game ever but it's my game. I made this from scratch which brings me back to my first point of how fufilling this feels to create something. How could I ever hate this :-)

You can play a build of 3 of the levels in "Fizzball" here

Also below is a preview of level 4. I have also added music and sound and I will upload a build soon.

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