I have been spending most of my nights, working on my block building prototype and have gotten a lot of interesting things working. All the blocks are merging and removing geometry faces as needed and groups of items are merged into a single mesh with proper sub-meshes in Unity. The most immediate problem I am tackling in that regard is to simplify the meshes so it is using as few polygons as possible. In the case where I am constructing my custom blocks to place into the scene, I should be able to isolate the problem and brute force it with good results. Since you are just dealing with simple geometric primitives in fixed aligned positions, you can work with your neighbours and create a good heuristic to follow. Some of those computations need to be moved to some native libraries so that they perform a lot faster though.
There are not just going to be cubes to place down. The are going to be slanted items and corner pieces as well, so that you can create a little less jagged items. Along with being able to configure the density of the custom mesh palette so that you can create more detailed items. These items are baked out into a single mesh item that can be dropped like a tillable block.
In addition to that, you are going to be able to save these little items and even import them into other games or prototypes. Fast creation of content to help build games out of, or grey-boxing of game levels to figure out the best setup in regards to dimensions and placement.
I have also been looking at the option of using the output from this to create the content for my programming game.
Ever since I upgraded to Unity 5, there have been this migration bugs in NOP that have not been fully addressed. I did manage to address a few of them over the weekend and got some of the prototype levels and mechanics working properly again.
I attended a Game Jam a couple of weeks ago, and the whole flow and mindset is completely different when you are creating games that you need to get running within a day or two. Me and a friend of mine managed to get a game up and running within the day and playable/testable by a group of people in the following day.
These Game Jams revolve very much around your ability to scope your ideas so that they will be ready within the time constraints. Be fluent in your environment so that you can create something very fast and have a simple idea so that you can get as far with it as possible.
I have to move house once again. The good news about that is, is that it is actually 3x bigger in terms of floor space and has a lot more rooms, so I could actually claim some good dedicated space to work on my games, art and music. I can´t wait actually. Most of my art supplies and stuff is in the attic at my sisters house, because I did not have space at my office for it, nor at my current apartment. My guitar and e-drums are also just storage fodder at the moment because of the lack of space. So, in about a month, all my game making equipment will be able to roam free again and my family can rejoice in all the space they possess while watching me skip between rooms like a cast member from the Sound Of Music.
V 