Runes: Songs of the Gods - The Start

What started as a quick practise session turned into much more. I put my main game which I named DroneBoats (a working title) on hiatus while I practised some of the stepping stones I was having trouble with. I jotted a quick design on a scrap piece of paper whilst at work. I wanted to get this little project out of the door in less than 1 month.

The original purpose of this project was to learn more about modelling, UV mapping and texturing. I somewhat managed to succeed in that, having no previous knowledge about these areas I managed to put together at least “ok” looking assets/textures/audio to use in the game. What I found interesting was how much I learnt code wise also.

In the next few posts I hope to cover (in varying degrees of detail I guess) what I went through to get things up and running. The little project has been in development for about 3 months now. I have a fulltime job and do this in what spare time I have. Below I have a screenshot of what it currently looks like (v1.0).

Click to enlarge - Giggidy!

The first steps as I mentioned was doing a quick design. Unfortunately I had only a vague idea in my mind. As I was distracted by the other game I was working on I didn’t take this design to seriously. Something that comes back to bite me in the testing part of the life cycle. I knew I wanted the following things:

• Basic “match-three” game.
• Decided on a druidic, runic theme
• I wanted the game to be 3D and when clicking on runes I wanted some neat, lively effects

With the last point I wanted sound effects and awesome lighting effects. Once I started making these things however I realised to how much time the lightning I wanted was going to take and changed the design. More on that later!

The tools I was going to use were:

• Unity3D
• Photoshop
• Blender
• Audacity

As a side note, even though I have development experience in basic C++, quite a bit of Java, Python etc. and I am familiar with OO programming I have never written any C# apart from a Hello World console program years ago. I have also not done any real development work since University 2-3 years ago. So yea … I’m a bit rusty.

I really enjoyed the learning opportunity to use C# in an interesting and engaging way. I have never picked up a programming language this quickly before and it’s largely thanks to the fact that I am genuinely interested and proud of my little project.