Video game development

Only 6 hours now, and I will be at the dock18 together with around 40 other Swiss game designers and start churning out games in 48 hours. Yes, it is Global Game Jam time! A first for me (and a lot of other people, I guess), but I'm definitely looking forward to it (which is, frankly, weird, since I usually don't like events with a lot of people I don't know).

If you want to stay in the loop, I think you might keep an eye on IGDA Switzerland, on the GGJ11 hashtag for a global overview.

I intend to post more as soon as there is something to see ... stay tuned!

Exporting an animated armature with a mesh for Unity using Blender 2.5 can be a bit of a hassle. With the armature parented to the mesh, I could either export the mesh or the armature with the animations, but never both.

Having the armature separate from the mesh seemed to have worked – I have now everything set up in Unity, both mesh and armature with animation.

Though the animation looks slighty wobbly …

This might work for simple animations; more complicated set-ups might still fail to export, since Blender 2.5 and Unity3D 3.0 both have not exactly extensively tested.

When preparing my game for Fantoche, I ran into problems several times, since upon building my game, the screen either remained black or parts of my game did not work, with the log showing a NullReferenceException.

In both times, it was related to me tagging objects in the Unity 3D editor. This is caused by the somewhat peculiar implementation of tagging in Unity which only allows one tag to be added to an object.

Pitfall No. 1: EditorOnly

Tagging objects in the editor as EditorOnly will make the game work in the editor – but not in the build, as those objects won't be included when building your game.

Pitfall No. 2: Trying to Access One of Several Objects with the Same Tag

When accessing GameObjects using the FindObjectsWithTag() function, make sure that only one object has this tag added.

The function returns the first object with this tag it encounters.

Just in case you are as stupid as I am and place the imported models in your Unity 3D scene and later realise that prefabs would have been rather fab: This is the solution: Drag your new prefab onto the old model in the hierarchy pane while having pressed alt – instant replacement. And once again, the day is saved.