Warp Wars 0.2 On The Move (Region Tool)

At the beginning of V 0.2, we felt a need to hold back all the plans, until we felt our design was complete.  Its not complete yet, but I believe it is far enough along that we can start sharing pieces of it.  That first piece is the:

Region Tool

The region tool is a system that allows us to define a specific area of our game map.  This can be used to lock down regions where buildings can be constructed, areas where bridges can go, safe zones, AI information, etc.  

The specific reason we chose to build it, was to support one of our basic designs for the game, Gridless Buildings.  We want a player to have pixel perfect placement of their buildings.  Most games like this use some kind of tile based system.  But we want our designers to be able to create worlds that are rich, and take full advantage of 3D terrain.  

In order to do this, we needed a way to detect if our building was within certain buildable areas, i.e. reasonably flat ground.  The designers will build the world as the wish, and then use the region tool to mark safe areas.  

Enter the new problem.  Unity does not have out of the box support for this.  You can't even edit individual vertices in unity, you can only stretch, rotate and reposition entire models. To do this, I needed to write code that would generate editable points on each vertice to allow us to reshape them in the game.  Here is a video showing that.

Book Release: Indie Game Development with C# and XNA

I've just released a book that can be found here: free-ebooks.net/ebook/Indie-Game-Development-with-C-XNA

Its part of my (future) series, From Concept to Complete.  It takes you on a journey of making a game, where you act as a team member helping to prepare the entire thing.

• Game Design (brain storming, defining fun, minimal documentation)
• Team Management (how to keep people motivated, and the project progressing)
• Beginning C# Programming (Covers quite a bit)
• XNA Game Development (Multiplatform, 2D for us, but also does 3D)
• Game Release (Finances, Marketing, Investors)

I have been teaching Game Development courses at colleges since 2006 and have not found a book that I thought worked well enough with my teaching style, and really covered what I wanted it to cover.  So I kept preparing my own handouts and materials.  This book is based on the materials and training that I have been perfecting class after class and refining based on results.  

At present, most of my work relates to Unity 3D for game development, such as for my project, Warp Wars.  Perhaps in a year I will generate a book on Unity 3D, after I've had a chance to teach it in a couple class rooms.  XNA is not dead though.  It works great, and if you are planning to develop a fully 2D game, XNA is actually a better choice.  Unity 3D can do 2D, but it is not focused on it, and requires some extra hoops to get 2D to work.  XNA is a great place to start, and relatively easy to build games from a programmers mind.  Unity is built more for a Designers mind.