The Tutorial Takes Shape

Well I know It has been a few weeks since I last made a post, it has been a busy few weeks for me and the storm is not over yet. I leave for an out of state wedding in two weeks, and the past couple weeks I have been finishing up my A.S. degree. But I have had some time to paper and pencil some of the things I need to do to get this tutorial going and will make the first post about it in the next few days. I have thought about what will be covered in detail and what things will be glossed over as what I consider a separate subject that is beyond the scope of the tutorial. The detailed portion will deal with the actual programming and logic that will all be done in unity. The glossed over parts will involve the actual model building in blender. I am not much of an artist so most of the models will be very basic. I plan on making an introductory post that will lay out the goals of the project and list the tools and resources that will be used on a separate page here on Rygorn’s Coding Journey. in the next day or two and then hope to have part one of the tutorial finished before I leave. I hope that as I do this to test my own skills I am able to help some others as well. Come with me on this journey and lets learn to program the world.

Rygorn

The Next Step

So now that I have had a little time to sort out where I want to go, I have come up with my next step. While seriously considering my abilities, like all people, the elements of self doubt began to settle in. I started to wonder, am I truly a good programmer or am I just a very good Googler. To keep my self on track and answer this question, I have decided to create a program 100% without Googling any logic. In this process I am going to write a tutorial on making a 3D pinball game in Unity 5 and maybe a bit of Blender for some modeling. I will probably create an additional page on this website dedicated to this tutorial as well as a github for it. I hope by doing this I will both help others looking to become programmers and improve my own abilities. As I start this tutorial you’ll have to bear with me as it may take some time between posts as I work out each section of the program as well as how to format the tutorial. I will try to keep up with general posts just to keep everyone up to date with progress both on this project as well as other things going on.

Rygorn

The Beginning

Hello everyone.

To start off with this site is here to document my journey to becoming a software developer and more specifically a game developer. This journey officially started a few years ago when I was out of work, my skills were not in demand, and I decided to go back to school to try to turn a set of hobbyist programming skills into something marketable. (Though this journey probably started years before that in the world of gaming.) So far this has been a long and hard journey but I will not bore you with the details of the schoolwork involved and each nuance of every new programming language I have learned to date. Instead I will bore you with everything that happens from this point on, but to do that I will need to give you a short background.

I am from what I consider the original gamer generation. You know those of us that were born in the 70’s and 80’s that started off with systems like Atari and NES or even the Odyssey. Playing games like Pong, Pac Man, and Super Mario Bros. I am from a generation that grew up along with the growing and maturing gamer world, rather that being thrust into a world where games are already reaching a level of interactivity most of us never thought possible while dumping quarters into a box trying to get the high score on Galaga. To be honest I consider myself lucky to have seen the evolution of the video game from the beginning. And even though I see things from my childhood now regaining popularity as retro, I know I was one of the ones that played it first.

Now that I got that out of my system on to the future. Today I start development on the first of my own game designs. I have batted a few ideas around for a while now on what I was going to do and have finally decided on one. I will not be sharing any specifics of game details or code here, but rather be sharing my problems and solutions in a more general sense. At least until I have more locked down as far as copyright protection worked out. I will also be sharing new things I learn along the way. You know after I finally figure out the proper way to code a custom character controller, or work out that math for a particular physics solution. So yes, for those of you that are wondering, I will be setting up a github to share code samples that are not too specific to a project I am working on.

From this point on this is where I will document the rest of my journey, and I hope you will follow along with me, if I haven’t scared you off with my long winded intro. Now let us march forth and see what challenges each new day brings.

Rygorn