Speed Optimizations

You may or may not have noticed that there have been some speed improvements (approximately 50% faster) made to the site in the past couple days. I have done some removal of resource-intensive plugins and replaced them with less-resource intensive variations (or just eliminated them entirely) so you should notice that the site and its respective posts/pages will load much more quickly then before.

Retro Runner – Resurrection

Original GameMaker8 screenshot of Retro Runner.

As my familiarity of Unity continued to grow and with steady progress being made on my 3D platforming game: Besus: Journey for Vitality, one night the thought to resurrect my Retro Runner project in Unity popped in to my head. My only hesitation came from how I would go about porting a project I started in GameMaker 8 to Unity 3D. After exploring the 2D functionality offered in Unity, I knew it could be done with relative ease and decided to pursue this new endeavor.

In order to get started with 2D in Unity, I downloaded the “official” 2d platformer tutorial/asset from the asset store to familiarize myself with 2D rigidbodies and Vector2’s. After taking a look at how everything worked, I stripped away what I didn’t need and ended up just using the Rigidbody2D forces being applied for movement and jumping. Even then, I only needed to apply a constant force to the player as horizontal force would always be applied (with the exception of slowing down while sliding). With the movement established I created a simple camera script which set the camera transform to the equivalent of the player transform (with an adjustable x-axis offset). Now that the core mechanics were in place, I moved on to getting the graphics portion of the game ported over.

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Besus: Journey for Vitality on IndieDB

I just finished updating my new IndieDB page for Besus: Journey for Vitality. Although it is still pending authorization, the page can be found here.

Major updates will likely be the only ones to be added to the IndieDB updates page, so for those looking for more in-depth information on the development continue to check this one!

Besus: Journey for Vitality

Besus: Journey for Vitality Development Blog – Volume 5

Time for volume 5 of my video development blog series following development of Besus: Journey for Vitality!
Updates focused-on in this volume include:

  • Texture-based footstep sounds
  • Improved/expanded dialog system
  • Scene-workflow and transition changes
  • New Firefighter powerup
  • Water-level control button