Personal Project Updates
About 6 weeks ago, I posted about a little game I made in a day. Since then, I have been working on a number of personal projects motivated by personal education.
Wind and Waves Prototype
Quack!
What if boats had a stamina bar? Originally a 1-day prototype to explore this concept, I followed up by adding two scenarios:
Collect 5 ducks in turbulent waters
Navigate a treacherous canyon
Having proved that I could still stand up a project from scratch, I decided not to pursue the prototype further. It did not feel compelling enough to dominate my precious learning time.
Labyrinth Generation
Isn’t programmer art beautiful?
I have dabbled in procedurally generated levels before (see Starskipper prototype on my projects page).
This time around, I wanted to generate spaces that felt like they had lived many lives. My goals were:
clusters of rooms that do not feel like they are on a grid.
connected by minimum hallways.
The result is this labyrinth generation package. Here it is implemented as a unity package manager package.
Brushing up on my C++
The majority of game jobs in the current market seem to require C++ experience. I’ve brushed with C++ here and there, but now it is time to do so in earnest. To that end I am working my way through learncpp.com
Next
Having spent a couple weeks working my way through C++ lessons and exercises, my next goal is to translate my labyrinth generator into a C++ library. Then I want to then port it into Unreal Engine! How exciting!
The last time I took a good look at Unreal was a decade ago when deciding whether to commit to learning Unity or Unreal deeply. At the time, Unity was the right choice. I’ve had a lot of career success with Unity Engine and C#. Now it is time to broaden my skillset into Unreal Engine.
Let’s go!
