Wanted to give a quick shout out to a kindred spirit, Marraboy over at Unity 3D -- Zero to Hero. He recently started a blog to chronicle his progress building a game with Unity and Cheetah 3D. He's only written a handful posts so far, but I just want to say, "You can do it, Marraboy!"
It's still by no means proven whether I can do it, but I did get some much-needed words of encouragement from a good friend over the weekend. This no-budget-game-development thing can get pretty daunting, particularly on days when I realize how much more there is to learn.
Case in point: Unity's ShaderLab. It's a programming interface for creating shaders in Unity (a shader describes how an object will look in the game -- what textures it will use, how it will react to light, etc.). This mind-bogglingly powerful feature of Unity is, I'm beginning to discover, the difference between amateur work and real professional visual quality. Sure, modeling and texture art are essential, but custom shaders add the flair.
Of course, working with shaders requires some knowledge of OpenGL's shader language, of which I have none, so I feel quite outmatched at the moment. As usual, though, I'm probably getting ahead of myself. SPUDZOOKA isn't done yet, and I can't get too caught up in the next thing.
No, I shouldn't be worrying too much about shaders yet. They just remind me that I need to take things one step at a time. Visual polish is not my strong suit, since I never had any formal training. But that's ok. I like to think that what I lack in skill, I make up in blind determination.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Shout out(s) and shaders
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All in due time Ben. The good thing about the shaders, as long as I am understanding them correctly, is that they are completely modular (or maybe that is all of unity, i have done next to zero reading on using it so I apologize). So you can get Spudzooka to a point that you feel good about and then implement the "ohh shiny" stuff later at a more appropriate time.
ReplyDeleteYeah, the shaders are really modular. If I wanted I could finish everything in the game and then go back and tweak the shaders (once I learn better how to do that) without touching anything else.
ReplyDeleteFortunately, though, SPUDZOOKA doesn't really call for anything too crazy. There aren't a whole lot of reflective, bumpy, or otherwise detailed surfaces...but I guess there could be.
More realistic rust on the barrels, and come on, we HAVE to have ultra realistic cardboard! But true, it is nice to know that the option for beauty is there.
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