Matti's Tech Blog

2020-07-02

Devblog #5: Trying out the Unity Package Manager

How I tried and mostly failed to migrate to the Unity Package Manager

As I continue on my tenth year of trying to find a game project to focus on, I decided to bring an old procedural map generation experiment back from the dead, upgrade it to Unity 2019.4 LTS and also replace my Git submodule setup with Unity packages. I’ve not quite succeeded with that last part.

2020-05-01

Devblog #4: Highlights for March and April 2020

It's been well over a couple of months since the last one of these, so here's a quick overview of the highlights

Over the last two months I've made minimal progress on the infinite racer game, experimented with higher detail 3D modeling and HDRP, began transitioning to Unity packages and updated a couple of my Node.js libraries.

2020-03-21

Why and How I Deploy This Blog With GitHub Actions

A look at how (and why) this blog, built with a home-brew static site generator, is deployed using GitHub Actions

This blog is powered by my self-made static site generator. At first, I did the deployment process manually but wanted to automate it by using a CI pipeline. Here are some thoughts on which ones I looked at and why I've gone with GitHub Actions for now, and some details on how I'm using them to deploy this site.

2020-02-16

Devblog #3: Some minor gameplay tuning

Week three of the project has been a bit slower, but does feature some adjustments to make the gameplay feel a lot smoother

I spent a little less time on the infinite runner project this week so most of the progress has been small adjustments, like increasing the game's speed, making controls more responsive, prototyping the user interface and some small visual adjustments. I'm also looking into reviving one of my older learning projects.

2020-02-09

Devblog #2: Adding some gameplay

With the addition of NPC traffic, a game over state and some progress indicators, my infinite runner game now technically has some gameplay

Major additions from last week are proper background scenery, traffic so the player has something to avoid hitting, a game over state when they do hit something and some placeholder UI elements to show score and distance travelled. I also ended up spending a fair bit of time on background systems and structuring to try and keep the codebase maintainable.

2020-02-02

Devblog #1: Street racing themed infinite runner

After a week of work, the basic outline of my latest project is beginning to take shape.

A week ago, I started working on a street racing themed, ultra-casual mobile infinite runner game. Not terribly original, I know, the app stores are filled with this sort of thing after all. But the point here is to actually release something, not to be original or profitable. I've been dicking around in Unity for close to ten years now without ever actually completing or releasing any actual games. Surely, if I haven't learned enough to release a simple mobile game by now, I'm probably never going to.