ROB - A Short History of Nearly Everything

I just finished A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson for the 3rd time. It's obviously one of my favorite books. This book is chocked full of inspirational topics: the vastness of space, the geology of Earth, meteor impacts, the dawn of life, how a cell works... there is just so much to take in. The really outstanding part to me is the personalities of the past geniuses who discovered these things; the juxtaposition of their human eccentricities and their immensely important discoveries.

What are the gaming takeaways? A puzzle game about how DNA replicates? That would end up being a bit too simple. A sim game balancing important scientific discoveries and the pettiness of human actions? Eh, that might be like Civ will all the fun taken out. Plus all these scientist rarely, if ever, went to war.

As stupid as this might sound, when I read about these people I was reminded of the movie Real Genius. Incredibly brilliant people playing pranks and sabotaging others' work; work that could reshape the world completed in an environment of people acting like children.

If you combined a tech discovery system (resources, time, trees, equip slots, combining, etc.) with some systems for incredibly petty pranks (traps, shooting, sneaking, resource competition, sabotage) you could capture essence of this ideal.

It would be nice to take the player characters down to school kids on the playground or remove the human elements and make them an Ewok-like race of incredibly smart pranksters.

Goals could center around out pacing your neighbors or just reaching a certain tech first.

Unity 3D 2.6.1

If you got frustrated because Unity 2.6 crashed when you tried to paint trees, a new version is out that fixes that bug among other things.

On a related note, I completed the excellent tutorials by Will Goldstone and purchased his book Unity Game Development Essentials. If you do the video tutorials, you know the basic project of the book. However, where the video shows you 1 way to do something, the book shows you 5 more detailed techniques. His video and book are the best thing I have found to learn Unity so far.

New Game! Flapjack - Thrills and Chills

Our team launched a new game! Flapjack - Thrills and Chills.

I really love how this game turned out. We had little development time so I worked up a simple, auto-scrolling, 1-button design. The way our programmer implemented to flips created additional dynamics which made the game even better than I hoped.

The artwork and sounds turned out great. I love the snow particles and the HUD elements. If you can get 10+ flips in one jump you get the confetti cannon!

I love having the opportunity to work on huge games like TKO and then getting to jump to small, addictive games like Thrills and Chills.