Well a couple years ago I decided to get serious about making games, at the very least make it into a hobby I could do at home.  I had a design for a dragon raising game in some notebooks, had been programming in the business world for 6 or more years, and could squeak out art good enough for at least a prototype.  My problem is I didn’t want to write an engine, I wanted to make a game.  So what was a girl to do?

Strangely enough at about that time a new company was announced at a TechCrunch event.  This company Areae was announcing the beginning of an Alpha test for an online world building platform called Metaplace.  It fit perfectly, it was built to support exactly what I wanted to do.  I had my engine!  I read everything I could from the event, which was really very little, but a ton of promise.

I took a leap of faith, which is totally not like me at all, and bought a domain name and created a wiki that was going to be used to support the platform and report on any new information that was announced.  I applied to the Alpha.

Turns out I got in, which is kinda old news if you have read any of my past entries.  What I didn’t mention is I found out later on that my programming experience wasn’t really enough to get me in the Alpha by itself and neither was my wiki, I had decided to do a small thing and because of that little thing I pushed myself into the early Alpha and got in on something that has given me opportunities I had thought I missed out on.

On October 11th of last year, about 3 months ago, I was hired by Playdom, which is really a division of Disney, which bought Metaplace a few month prior.  I am a professional game developer now!  So yeah I have been making games, it has been amazing, lots of work, and often times almost surreal to think I get to do this and get paid for it.  For obvious reasons I can’t say what I am working on, how I am working on it, or really much of anything about it.

This is and has always been my dream job.  This is what I answered as a kid when someone asked me what I wanted to do when I grow up.  It only took a few games on an Atari 2600, or maybe it was the Colecovision under the tree one Christmas, but it was the dream.  Then life took over, things happened, responsibilities arrived way younger than they should have and the dream was put on a shelf, only to be dusted off every once in a while in the form of a DirectX book here, or a VB game there, maybe some 3D modeling, or a few seamless textures in Photoshop.  It would always go back on the shelf, and the truth is I figured that the ship had sailed.  I had made choices, was rewarded in many ways, but the dream job was no longer on the list of things that were possible.

I know I am kinda rambling, but all I can say is I am living up to my blog header.  Guess my point is if you wants dreams to come true at some point you need to stop dreaming and try doing something about it.  You may end up just learning something about yourself, figuring out something new you can do, or some other small thing, but sometimes if you are lucky and driven you might just get that dream.

I won’t really be posting about my job, or what I am doing, if things change and for whatever reason I am no longer in the industry I can almost guarantee the posts will return.  Anyway, that is all for now.

So there is that.

1. You can use a prefab, think of it like a stamp, and use it with the Instantiate function to create objects.
2. The script needs a reference to the prefab.  Right now all I know it that means selecting the prefab in the IDE from exposed object variable in my script.  (This will need to be fixed because I need to be able to set this in code as players pick different objects to place.)

Number 2 is the thing I was stuck on that made my code not work for awhile.  So yeah pretty much you can blame me not knowing what I am doing yet.

Here is the code I have on the terrain to create an object.  I am thinking this will eventually not be on the terrain because what I really want is a copy of the prefab following the mouse till you click to place it.  The Terrain click would send an event to that prefab to place on terrain where it is at.

var SampleObject:GameObject;

function OnMouseUp(){
 var pos = Camera.main.GetComponent("TerrainLine");
 var SampleObject =
     Instantiate(SampleObject,
     Vector3(pos.x_pos, pos.y_pos, pos.z_pos),
     Quaternion.identity);
}

The Camera.main.GetComponent is used to access the script in the camera that is tracking the location on the terrain.  (This is the same script making the terrain highlight.)

Quaternion.identity is completely and shamelessly stolen from a sample script and I am not sure what it means yet.

Here is a video of what the click to place does right now and some basic panning using the arrow or WASD keys.

It is just so much fun learning a new game maker when I used to know one so well I could make things in my hour lunch.  Sigh…

Will it stop me?  Not a chance.. back to it tonight if I have the time!

Side note.  I have a 45degree camera that pans on keyboard left, right, up, down, or WASD   That part was real easy so the night wasn’t a total loss.

Ok personal internet time up for this break. To be continued.

Here is a video of a basic projector following the mouse, I know the quality is questionable but you make due with a budget of zero.

The projector is attached to a GameObject that changes position to match the current position of the raycast hit onto the terrain.  Seems to work.

Few tricks, I had to find a additive shader example to highlight the terrain instead of darken it.  The texture had to have solid black edges or strange things would happen.  The materials had to be set to clamped.  I know I may be forgetting something else I set, but for now that is that.

function Update(){

  var ray = Camera.main.ScreenPointToRay  (Input.mousePosition);
  var hit : RaycastHit;
  if (collider.Raycast (ray, hit, 100.0)) {
  Debug.DrawLine (ray.origin, hit.point);
   }
}

So remember this code.  Here is what I have found out so far.  It actually does work, but doesn’t draw a line like I was expecting, well not one I can see.  I think what is happening is the line is projecting straight into the camera which makes it one pixel when looked at from the camera it is projected from, kinda like holding a pencil so you can only see the eraser.  Anyway I figured out this script needed to be attached to the Camera to make it work, there was no mention of that in the code sample.  I am sure they just figured everyone would know that.

As I worked on it I also learned how the print() function works to place the values I wanted to inspect into the console.  So for now I am projecting a ray down to the terrain and returning the point on the terrain I am hitting.

Now what I need to do is take that point and create an object that doesn’t render above it and attach a projector to that object that is pointed down.  Add the right material to that projector and I should have highlighted a spot on the ground where the mouse is pointing.  Step one at allowing a player to place an object on the ground.  Yay for progress; even if it is slow!

function Update(){

  var ray = Camera.main.ScreenPointToRay  (Input.mousePosition);
  var hit : RaycastHit;
  if (collider.Raycast (ray, hit, 100.0)) {
  Debug.DrawLine (ray.origin, hit.point);
   }

}

It seems like this will do the trick.. Obviously this code isn’t manipulating a camera, but it looks like a good starting point.  I do need to figure out how to have the ray pass through objects and hit the terrain below, but I think I may have found a good link for that too.

I sure wish after programming all day at work I had more motivation to program more at home.  I really need to start making some test code and seeing where the technical limits are hiding.

Yesterday I spent a bit of time at lunch digging for how I would place a highlighted spot on the terrain below the mouse pointer and wasn’t successful, but I need to tinker some with the possible methods before I give up.  It is looking like my best bet might be something called a projector.  I just need to figure out if I can attach it to something that tracks the location of the mouse and have it always point directly down to the ground.  I think that might accomplish what I want.

What that will allow is the click of the mouse will place an object at the location of the highlight on the terrain.  Which of course is another thing I need to figure out.  Oh and all of this will be for placement of object by a player or do actions on that spot on the terrain.

What am I thinking for a game?  Something farm like and island like, but with a twist that allows a bit more twitch gameplay if the player wants to activate that piece of the game.  Will I finish something like this?  Absolutely no idea right now, but I would like to as I am really excited about the design I have on paper right now.

My biggest obstacle besides time will be asset creation.  I will either have to make some really rough mockups in Blender or find someone that can do 3D modeling later when I want to polish the graphics.

I also have no plans to make the whole game at once.  I want to make the semi twitch game first then the farm island game then combine them then integrate into Facebook if it still seems fun.  So really I am making three games and it any one piece isn’t fun I can just dump it and release the single game.

Oh and along these lines I have created a logo for my games:

I found my original notebook from early 2007 with outlines, maps, ability breakdowns, mechanics and all kinds of other things all related to Dragonlins, my long shot dream of a MMO I wanted to make.  Then Metaplace was announced and I was handed a server, one of the biggest obstacles to making the game or so I thought.

I bought metadeveloper.net and created a wiki dedicated to Metaplace developers and started filling it with information as Raph and his team leaked it to us.  I had applied to Alpha as soon as the form was available.  Later on I learned it was the web site that put my experience up to par with what they were looking for in an Alpha tester.  It turns out my website was pointless though, since they had such a wonderful wiki that was completely open to the public for editing.  Once again now I know I should have duplicated that wiki for the public because it has been taken away as of the announcement of the closing of Metaplace.

With journal in hand and new Unity 3D book on my PC it all starts over and once again a server able to host a MMO is the big obstacle.  I have learned a lot about what one person can do and know that my biggest obstacle for technology may be the server, but the even bigger obstacle is time and assets.

Whenever I would start a new project in Metaplace it was always halted when I had to create graphics to drive the vision.  Despite what Raph pointed out about not caring about the graphics while prototyping I just don’t have it in me not to make things work as I go.  Part of it working in my head is the graphics have to at least be partially acceptable, not just scribbles.

I am not letting that stop me.  I plan on starting on Dragonlings once again once I get more up to speed in Unity and now in Blender.  However I am not so delusional this time to think I can do this alone.  One way or another I will eventually need help, because the fact it a single person can’t make an MMO.  As for the server question, for now I will build it the game and figure that out later.  If I can’t make something worth playing without people, then I don’t think it would be worth playing with people.

I hope to record my experiences in Unity 3D here as I progress and hopefully to post demos of what I have done so far.  As for Metaplace I am ready to let it go now.  The files have been backed up, the emotions processed, and the friend contacts recorded.  It was an amazingly fun time and I will miss that community, because the people are what really made Metapace so great.

Enough rambling for now.. but I will be posting still despite the end of how this all started.