The Long Night: The Beginning...

A bit about me...

So, I do game and graphics development as a hobby, trying to fit it all in during the very sparse spare time that I have. Back in the days of XNA I was even an DirectX/XNA MVP for about 4 years, I have helped (I like to think) a fair few people in the indie game development community, even have my name on a few credits, some for the use of my technical blog posts, others as I was lucky enough to help out on the games development. I even have a few assets on the Unity3D asset store.

I had been in a bit of a bad patch as far as my hobby goes, sort of lost my mojo a little, lacked a bit of direction. I have so many projects that I have started on my own and pretty much all of them unfinished. Then Dream.Build.Play 2017 came along in July, but typically I was on a long (4 weeks) family holiday in Australia at the time, by the time I got back and had adjusted to being home again, it was almost September, so I thought that I was way too far behind the curve to get anything together in time for the December deadline. Then I saw a post by Tarh Ik, someone I have know online since the days of XNA, then followed a post by, again someone I have known online for a number of years, again, from the time of XNA (it was such a great community) Simon Jackson, both of these posts as well as the fact that DBP (Dream.Build.Play) has been around for a long time, again starting out around the time of XNA, has got me wanting to write a game again, and so I have entered DBP with my title "The Long Night"

My skills are very much in the programming and shaders worlds of games development. I am about as artistic as a stick when it comes to 2D, 3D art and/or Audio, so my game will not have awesome art and models, but I am hoping that the game play and story might be enough to get others interested in it, and maybe have some collaborators. The idea, in the long term is not to have a single game, but a series of games where with each "episode" the story unfolds a little more, but I am getting a head of my self....

My Entry: The Long Night

I have never really done a story driven game before, my other WIP's tend to be platformers, shooters or exploration games, this is really the first time I have attempted anything like this, and I find that quite exciting :) 

The story is an old Sci-fi trope really, Humanity once ruled the stars, traveling at will between them, then something terrible happened, no one knows exactly what it was, but it all started to break down, worlds became less and less visited, the knowledge to maintain technologies was slowly lost, worlds degenerated into feudal realms having no contact with other planets anymore and losing the knowledge and even the desire to make contact with other civilizations. Many now do not even know that Humanity had such technology, indeed, some worlds think they are the only human worlds, and look to the stars as we once did, thinking they are alone in the vast expanse of space, their world, a blue marble floating in the velvet blackness of space is the only world, the cradle of humanity that exists.

Tools I'll Use

I use Google Docs quite a bit, Unity3D (2017), a very old copy of Photoshop (CS2?), Trello (good for planning if you have not used it before)  For my source control Ill be using Visual studio Online and of course, Visual Studio :)

How is it going?

Slow lol, At the moment I have my story (most of it) on docs, I have the past few weeks been re appropriating some of my terrain generators in Unity for the game as well as integrating a new terrain shader I am working on. Last week I created code and classes to handles generic rumor generation, as well as NPC name generation, this now all needs to come into the rumor manager so I can then start laying the story out in code.

Had a bit of a set back this weekend, and is why I am writing this blog post, my laptop seems to be having a few issues, and may even be on it's last legs (I hope not) so as I have been writing this I have been updating drives and backing up what I have on here :/ 

Going forward, I am hoping to do a few more blog posts, but also to do some Vlog posts on my Youtube channel.

Anyway, hope you have found this first post interesting enough that you would want to follow my progress.