"Cause" RTS Game

I've been working on an RTS game in Unity for fun. The idea is that you'll try to convert civilians to your side using various means of propaganda and subversion, and then create a force to crush the forces of the other ideologies.

Here's a screenshot thus:

More soon!

Magic the Gathering Web Scrape

When building decks for Magic the Gathering, I like to use gatherer.wizards.com to find the cards, tappedout.net to build the deck and tcgplayer.com for pricing info. Unfortunately this can be time consuming, especially copying, pasting, and formatting each card name from gatherer.wizards.com to tappedout.net.

Fortunately I've written a python script that takes a gatherer.wizards search url as a string and then copies every card name to your clipboard, formatted correctly for mass entry on tcgplayer. Uses python 3.5.4 and BeautifulSoup which you'll need to install with pip.

Check it out on github

One weird quirk is that the string only stays copied to the clipboard while the script is looping for a few seconds (and thereafter if you paste it during this time), though the script gives you a window to paste at this point. Let me know anyone knows a better way to approach clipboard commands.

GameDevMap Scraping with Python

GameDevMap.com is an excellent resource for finding game companies across the world. I wanted to see which companies had jobs that I might be interested in but doing it manually would be insurmountable- cue Python.

You can find the script on github

The script uses BeautifulSoup and urllib in Python 3.5.4. It gets all of the info listed on GameDevMap as well as a search for the company on duckduckgo.com (it has a nice sans-js mode). The search (ie: "careers Westwood Studios") is then combed for keywords, in this case, "jobs", "careers", "programmer", "engineer", "developer", "unity". Unity was a little harder because words like "opportunity" and "community" gave false positives. The search runs two versions and when it's done, writes to csv. The csv can then be imported into Google Sheets where it can be viewed and sorted.

Check out my sheets import here

A nice future improvement would be multithreading which would speed things up quite a bit. Feel free to do what you like with the script, let me know if it helps.

OpenGL Game Engine - Part 1

I've been working on putting together a game engine using OpenGL, SDL and GLM. I've got textures loading, batching and displaying as 2D elements on screen. Input works so you can move around as Mario. 

I'd used this video series to get things off the ground and have been modifying the code once I got a good starting point. Things are very well explained and I highly recommend them.

Next steps are to get the architecture for nested elements and collision detection.

Here's a video of my progress thus:

Here's a link to download the source project (VS 2013)

Flappy Bird Lesson Using Scratch

I've made a version of the game "Flappy Bird" using the drag and drop coding environment, Scratch. Kids seem to respond well to this environment. On Saturday at the library, I'll be doing a class that teaches how to create this game using included assets. Hopefully I can include video of the lesson.

Here's a video of the game: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5AauB4MKwieRHhqYVRrU21uQzg

Here's the project: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/119594189/

Dayz 3D Map Updated

Click here for the 3D Map

I've made a number of changes and updates. Let me know if it runs ok or if there's anything you'd really like to see!

Navigation - I'm not entirely confident in the accuracy of the heightmap data so I've opted not to include pathfinding / navigation. I've included the assets in the source if you want to turn it on and mess around with it though. I'd timed the running speed of the character on the airstrip in-game, then timed the speed of the agent in Unity to make sure the agent speed is accurate.

Movement - I've changed the movement to use a free-fly approach. Thanks to the Unity community for some help there. You can change movement speed with the mousewheel.

Textures - I've included a normal map in the textures and altered the base material to negate some rendering issues. I've also updated the terrain to display a higher res version of the texture at further distances

Lighting - I've included a sun that goes up and down for day/night and also rotates for each day, changing it's position in the sky. Use Z,X,C to alter sun movement speed

Misc - Added town names in English and Cyrillic and made them face the camera and alpha out when getting too close. Added some controls for resetting the scene (Space) and cleaned up lots of little things that I don't immediately recall. Added screen text for controls and credits. I've also tweaked the terrain a bit since it didn't seem to match the ingame map 1:1.

Here's the source project (uses Unity 5.4.0b15). Feel free to modify it as you like. Please let me know if so and please credit me if you do. Thanks to rhennigan for the height map.

DayZ Map 3D

I've got my hands on a heightmap for DayZ, allowing me to make a 3D map in Unity. I've whipped up a prototype with improvements to come. I'll release the source once it's all done as well.

Click: Set Destination
Ctrl+Click: Teleport
Space: Stop
Scroll: Zoom
1,2,3,4,5: Change map texture

Check it out here