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In the wake of excitement among the Unity community after the announcement of popular video game portal, I created a prototype of a working "portal gun". In Portal, the player is given a device with which they can position two portals on certain walls and other surfaces. When both are put in place, the form a sort of inter-dimensional gate through which the player and other objects can pass. For example, the player might shoot a hole in the wall, and then the ceiling, and then walk through the wall, falling out the ceiling immediately afterward. I mimicked this behavior in a small demo as an experiment. When I gave out the source code others in the community tried to make it into a community project, however, that did not succeed.

Image from wired.com

I release another work in progress learning project. (no executable available)


Unity forum thread

About 4 months after starting with Unity I release my current learning project to the public for the first time. An executable is available, but only for Mac, and is probably crash prone.

Unity forum thread

I began learning Unity. I was sort of faced with a huge obstacle: I had never really programmed before besides the severely limited visual scripting from my old RPG engine. Also, 3D applications were completely new to me. Together this made it a bit like trying to build something in pitch black darkness. I knew I had to push forward though, even if I didn't understand it all until quite later. Due to this a cycle of learning sort of evolved that I still sometimes use to this day. Looking back I think I can say that this is how I learn:

1. Examine a problem.
   
2. Use my best guesses of what is relevant to try to look up information on the subject.
   
3.  Make guesses about how to apply what I information I have.
   
4.  Try a solution.
   
5.  Try to make sense of how the solution failed, and make guesses about other methods that might work, taking into account everything I know so far.
   
6.  Inquire with a relevant community about the problem.
   
7. Go back to step 2.
   

Before I really got into programming starting when I was very young and would sometimes draw mazes and then run around pestering people with them, trying to get people to figure them out. I had an interest in games or at least creating entertainment for others.

When I first really used how to use a computer I drew some simple maze games in photoshop and put them together in hyper card. This image is a reconstruction of my memory of what the first thing I did looked like.

When I was older my parents bought me this awful 2D Role Playing Game engine that I fairly quickly picked up on. It was unsupported and very rudimentary, it was sort of dropped in the middle of its development. For a long time I struggled with it and eventually got halfway through a few simple games like super simple hand drawn style rpgs, a top down tank shooter, and eventually an rpg with actual pixel art graphics that never got anywhere. Because I was around 13 at the time and just learning, compounded with the horribleness of the software I was using, these games never got anywhere and didn't make much sense.

Sadly I've lost all the data from these old projects so I will attach a screenshot of Secret of Mana 3, which was the inspiration for my pixel art game. I actually got some tilesets and levels done that looked similar, but obviously not as good.

Near the end of this stage I was modifying some existing games made with the Torque engine like Think Tanks, and I created a tic-tac-toe variant puzzle game with the RPG engine I was using, which was really pushing beyond it's limits. I was past ready to move on because the tool I had was limiting me, but I never found anything that didn't require a quantum leap as far as programming understanding was concerned.

Then, gracefully, Unity descended down from the heavens on a beam of light. It was just what I wanted and needed, and I got started right away.