Space Farm devlog 1

Howdy, internet people!  I've started a new game project, which I will call Space Farm until I come up with a real name.  If that working title isn't descriptive enough, Space Farm is a farming game set in space.  That's the bulk of the design document at the moment, to be honest.

I'll start keeping track of my progress here on my blog, partly to share with y'all and partly for my own convenience.  I'm a habitual note-taker and have found some of my old posts to be consistently helpful as I worked on GameMaker and Unreal Engine games-- hopefully this devlog will do the same as I get started in Unity.

A quick note on engine choice-- although I have a fair bit of experience in GameMaker, my last couple attempts at a project felt hindered by the development environment it provides.  I really wanted to start using the scripts feature as much as possible to make the code more modular/ reusable, but they didn't give me the level of control (or maybe flexibility?) I expected.  And so I tried UE4 for a while.  It seemed like it ought to have been a good fit considering how much I had played with UDK in school, but it just felt too heavy for this dinky little farming game.  Unity and C#, which I haven't really used before, will be my weapon of choice.  At least for now.

Ok, that's enough of a preamble-- let's get to what I've gotten done.  For this work session, I kept things simple so I wouldn't get overwhelmed by the switch to Unity.  First, and perhaps most importantly, I set myself up a repository I can save all my work to.  Right now it's just saving a copy onto another HDD on my computer, but since this machine likes to kill itself about once a year, I'll be considering better locations soon.

Second, I implemented a simple 2.5D camera and movement system.  Cameras are still kinda foreign to me after spending so long with GameMaker, so I had to do some Googling.  Some nice person on the internet had already posted their solution to exactly what I wanted, which might have helped a little too much, but got me up and running.  You can now move around the world in eight directions with the camera keeping you centered on the screen.  Fancy!

I went ahead and added some "dirt blocks" to the scene for fun.  They don't really do anything yet, but it's starting to look like something now.

That's all for now.  Like I said, trying to keep it simple at the start.  Next on my task list is interacting with the world, so that ought to be a little more complicated.