I’ve lately wanted to do something completely different and have picked up an interest for 2d and 3d game development.
A long time ago I used to create games for myself mostly because I wanted to learn more about graphics and test what was possible with the CPU and hardware of that time. Now, this was 80286 Intel based processors mostly, and yeah, it was hard. The games were simple and in the style of ‘snake’, ‘chaser’, ‘breakout’, etc.
Both Lynda.com (nowadays owned by LinkedIn), and Udemy.com, offer great courses in game programming. So I have now completed some Udemy courses (by the great DevSlopes Game Academy team), and the official Unity3d tutorial, Space Shooter.
So, I’ve set up some small goals for myself. One was to familiarize myself with the Unity3d Game Engine.
Unity (at unity3d.com) is a great development environment. It doesn’t matter if you develop with Windows, Mac or Linux. Me, I’m on a Mac and it is quite easy to create games these days. You can create games targeted to run on up to an impressive 21 target platforms with Unity3d.
This game engine offers a fantastic world of things for real time editing, scripting, graphics, rendering, physics and more, you just have to know what you want to dream up and what the game engine can offer. For Unity I opted for C# programming, but you can code in JavaScript or Boo.
Well, that goal is now reached. I will of course do more when I find the time.
Next up is the Unreal Game Engine, and that will be C++ based programming which is something I’ve done for many years, prior to when I decided to focus on Java.
Here’s a list of courses I’ve taken so far:
- https://www.udemy.com/devslopes-unity3d/learn/v4/overview
- https://www.lynda.com/Unity-tutorials/Unity-5-UI/384875-2.html
- https://www.lynda.com/Unity-tutorials/Unity-5-3D-Essential-Training/383666-2.html
- https://www.lynda.com/3D-Animation-Games-tutorials/Unity-43-Essential-Training/150613-2.html