Jul 1, 2013 at 3:07 PM
Join Date: Jun 28, 2013
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Posts: 10
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PocketCake Ingredients
By Cathie Sims
LavaCat launch July 27th, 2013 on Google Play. Building games for devices like Android requires a different approach than you would use for desktop PC games. Unlike the PC market, your target hardware is standardized and not as fast or powerful as a computer with a dedicated video card. Also, the features available in Unity differ slightly from those of desktop PCs.
First of all we wanted to develop the game with the minimal possible team. In our PocketCake office we have Parth Patel, as game programmer, and Kim Allen as graphic artist. Parth and Kim both graduated from Full-Sail University in Winter Park, FL. So with this small team, it was clear to us that we want to focus on developing the game itself and not implementing engines and tools of our own.
So, we decided to look for an engine with a good support for tools. LavaCat is a 2.5D game, or 3D engine with 3D physics (e.g., Unity3D). Unity is a cross-platform game engine with a built-in IDE developed by Unity Technologies. It supports our development for Android, Flash and Windows. The game engine is downloadable from their website in two different versions: Unity and Unity Pro. And of course, most importantly, we wanted the engine still in development with an active community.
The game engine's scripting is built on Mono, the open-source implementation of the .NET Framework. Parth uses UnityScript which supports code written in C#. Starting with the 3.0 release, Unity ships with a customized version of MonoDevelop for debugging scripts. Unity also has the ability to set continuous collision detection for individual bodies; a really important feature to us because we have some thin obstacles and fast moving objects in the game.
We feel Unity’s complete toolset, intuitive workspace and rapid, productive workflows help users to radically reduce the time, effort and cost of making interactive content. Unity is a fully integrated development engine that provides gorgeous out-of-the-box functionality to create games and other interactive 3D content. We use Unity to assemble our art and assets into scenes and environments; add lighting, audio, special effects, physics and animation; simultaneously play test and edit our games, and when ready, publish to our chosen platforms.
Other awesome engines, libraries and tools
It’s not just Unity that makes LavaCat purr. Kim uses Autodesk Maya for 3D modeling and animation; Photoshop CS6 for 2D texturing and drawing concept art as well as menu user interfacing; Zbrush for 3D sculpting and texture painting; and XNormal for mapping high resolution 3D on a low resolution 6-model. Each of these is equally important to making the game pristine.
For the audio, we chose Ableton Live 9 Suite. We highly recommend Ableton as well. This software creates, produces and performs music. Live’s Session View is a unique sketchpad for writing, improving and performing music. The Arrangement View is a powerful, linear music production environment. Use of Ableton Live 9 Suite is not completely free, but it’s very inexpensive for our developers.
LavaCat of course, also uses tons of additional open source libraries that do not play as big a role as the ones afore mentioned. However, this should give the general idea that we used a LOT of ready-made engines, libraries and tools to develop LavaCat. So, therefore, 95% of the time we were able to concentrate on just developing the actual game itself.
Conclusion
All in all, we highly recommend using Unity for any 2D and 3D game. It was easy to learn, use and modify. Without the engine and the awesome community, LavaCat would not have seen daylight this early. And with Unity, we have the possibility to bring the game to other platforms too in the future. Thank you for the awesome engine and all the support!
By Cathie Sims
LavaCat launch July 27th, 2013 on Google Play. Building games for devices like Android requires a different approach than you would use for desktop PC games. Unlike the PC market, your target hardware is standardized and not as fast or powerful as a computer with a dedicated video card. Also, the features available in Unity differ slightly from those of desktop PCs.
First of all we wanted to develop the game with the minimal possible team. In our PocketCake office we have Parth Patel, as game programmer, and Kim Allen as graphic artist. Parth and Kim both graduated from Full-Sail University in Winter Park, FL. So with this small team, it was clear to us that we want to focus on developing the game itself and not implementing engines and tools of our own.
So, we decided to look for an engine with a good support for tools. LavaCat is a 2.5D game, or 3D engine with 3D physics (e.g., Unity3D). Unity is a cross-platform game engine with a built-in IDE developed by Unity Technologies. It supports our development for Android, Flash and Windows. The game engine is downloadable from their website in two different versions: Unity and Unity Pro. And of course, most importantly, we wanted the engine still in development with an active community.
The game engine's scripting is built on Mono, the open-source implementation of the .NET Framework. Parth uses UnityScript which supports code written in C#. Starting with the 3.0 release, Unity ships with a customized version of MonoDevelop for debugging scripts. Unity also has the ability to set continuous collision detection for individual bodies; a really important feature to us because we have some thin obstacles and fast moving objects in the game.
We feel Unity’s complete toolset, intuitive workspace and rapid, productive workflows help users to radically reduce the time, effort and cost of making interactive content. Unity is a fully integrated development engine that provides gorgeous out-of-the-box functionality to create games and other interactive 3D content. We use Unity to assemble our art and assets into scenes and environments; add lighting, audio, special effects, physics and animation; simultaneously play test and edit our games, and when ready, publish to our chosen platforms.
Other awesome engines, libraries and tools
It’s not just Unity that makes LavaCat purr. Kim uses Autodesk Maya for 3D modeling and animation; Photoshop CS6 for 2D texturing and drawing concept art as well as menu user interfacing; Zbrush for 3D sculpting and texture painting; and XNormal for mapping high resolution 3D on a low resolution 6-model. Each of these is equally important to making the game pristine.
For the audio, we chose Ableton Live 9 Suite. We highly recommend Ableton as well. This software creates, produces and performs music. Live’s Session View is a unique sketchpad for writing, improving and performing music. The Arrangement View is a powerful, linear music production environment. Use of Ableton Live 9 Suite is not completely free, but it’s very inexpensive for our developers.
LavaCat of course, also uses tons of additional open source libraries that do not play as big a role as the ones afore mentioned. However, this should give the general idea that we used a LOT of ready-made engines, libraries and tools to develop LavaCat. So, therefore, 95% of the time we were able to concentrate on just developing the actual game itself.
Conclusion
All in all, we highly recommend using Unity for any 2D and 3D game. It was easy to learn, use and modify. Without the engine and the awesome community, LavaCat would not have seen daylight this early. And with Unity, we have the possibility to bring the game to other platforms too in the future. Thank you for the awesome engine and all the support!