Fighting the Inner Zombie Horde...

"It's Out at Last" or "Fighting the Inner Zombie Hord"

Yes, just released my first Unity based donationware* game Cancer Wars!

An online Cure them Up or Nanobots v Zombie Cells – Shooter for Charity.

It's here: http://CancerWarsGame.org/

Facebook page here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/CancerWarsGameorg/122883024419339

*free to play with the option to donate (50% to a Cancer Charity and 50% to development).

Sometimes it's the last few days before a release that are the hardest, the classic situation where you think you have 90% of it done and that last 10% just balloons out of all proportion!

There are all those Like To Have's that you know would be nice to have but would just eat up your time and if not managed and controlled could even break your project!

You may think of an indie game developer as someone churning away on a computer typing in arcane commands with funny syntax and getting upset about some silly logic stuff, but really you should think of them as craftsmen and women working away on their hi-tech workbenches making the next line of, exciting, amazing and fun experiences to share with you.

But if you look closer you will see all the scattered virtual concepts and designs they leave on the cutting room floor as they develop their next project!

Letting go is important!

That's why letting go is so important in the development, process for me with this project I just constrained myself to a release date of 14 Nov 2010.

OK it slipped a bit, had a few hiccups with the computer but that constraint, prevented me from building a bigger, better, brighter, burgeoning and bombastic version of the game that would never have seen the light of day!

Why Unity is Great

I've been working off and on Cancer Wars since 05 June 2010, at the time I was using the BlitzMax language ( a very cool language for development ) but finding that technology was going web/mobile and I was having to build most of my game engine from scratch or have to bring together a range of different solutions to do it and the complexity curve was just jumping away from me, leaving me bogged down in the minutia of the games messy mechanics.

Now you could say this is a reflection of my Design and Development skills but I think it was more along the lines of this (my excuse)...

Because BlitzMax is so powerful you can code game prototypes very quickly but when you start adding onto this hacked together code base the project can quickly become complex and complexity is the enemy of good design!

Or why game designer should throw away prototypes!

So it got to the stage that I dropped the project and moved onto another unfinished one (there are quite a few).

Anyway after migrating through a few projects I decided to give Unity another go, with a Halloween project (yep it didn't quite make the grade quick enough) but it did get me to realise that to really learn Unity I needed to simplify my game...

So Cancer Wars (a 2D cure-em up!) was reborn and with lots of online help/tutorials from the Unity community it got done.

One of the main reasons it did get finished is the ease at which games components can be put together using unity's UI, once you start to get your head around the way it works you can really get things moving/bouncing/shooting!

Combined with a one click build/test cycle and your onto a winner!

Which is great for us indie's as we don't want to be pipped to the post when we get bogged down with a potentially great game idea!

Check it out : http://Unity3d.com/

Just the beginning!

Hopefully this is just the beginning for my Unity projects, there is one that is waiting in the wings!

"Get back, you Evil halloween game you... Your Time will come HA HA HAA!"

Sorry where was I so hopefully I will be able to improve/enhance/extend Cancer Wars, donations allowing and dust of some of my other game ideas and designs and get them out there.

Who know's I might even be able to take you into the 3rd Dimension or even the 4th, If I can figure out how that one works!

Anyone know where I can get an NVQ in Time Travel, Anyone....?