How long has it been since I…. Oh…. Oh….. That long. “Daily posting” just won’t work.

The reason is that I have a bit of a “tripping down the stairs” problem with the “daily post” plan. For those that are not aware of that problem it goes something like this: I forget to write a post on day, or I have nothing to write about, or I plan on one and then get distracted and never get back to it. Then when I think to do another post and remember not making posts the previous days in my “daily posts” plan I don’t make a post that day out of embarrassment/guilt/panic, and so the problem is compounded.

So this time no strict schedule, a bit of behind the scene planning, and trying to be a bit looser about my topics, will hopefully allow me to do weekly posts. Maybe not on the same day each week (not at first at least) but weekly I hope.

Been a while since I posted here. How long was it….. Ooookay that is too long.

So here’s a bit of an update on where I am. I got a job! Not a game design job but a job nonetheless. I am working at the Channel Fireball warehouse in the fulfilment department pulling card orders. For those of you that don’t know Channel Fireball sells Magic: the Gathering cards in both sealed product and single cards.

This is not to say I have stopped looking for a game design job, I am still applying everywhere and sharpening my skills. But I needed a job to get me off my but and motivate me, the paycheck is nice too.

Neo / Ipsum for Excel is almost ready for release, it should be ready latter tonight or early tomorrow morning along with a little surprise (I hope).

While I wait for final testing to get back to me with the ok I have gone back to working in Unity. Its been a while and most of the UI has changed. As part of getting back in to the swing of Unity development I decided run through some of the tutorials on the Unity website, and I am learning and re-learning a few things.

For most of the games I have made player movement was handled by waiting for WASD movement inputs and then applying the appropriate force or transform effect. In this first tutorial it used Input.GetAxis commands to determine what the input is for any given controller and use that to apply force. this has a few limitations but is much more flexible than the method I previously used most often.

Also I had decided I would make a quick rotation script to rotate the scene’s directional light, that should only take a minute right? 15 minutes, and three different methods latter I figure out that my script is working exactly the way it is supposed to but is rotating on the local axis. Because I wanted to rotate the Y axis and had already rotated the X axis this caused some silly effects. I solved this by making an empty game object, putting it in the same position as the light, setting it’s rotation to 0, 0, 0, and putting the script on that game object.

The rotation thing is something I have to relearn every time I try to do anything with rotation because of the way rotational math works (in short it seems to have an extra dimension and otherwise everything says “don’t touch unless you know what you are doing”).