The Setup

I begin my journey with the purchase of a book. Or rather one gifted to me on my last birthday – Code Gamers Development Essentials by A.E. Colonna (Amazon link). He had some interesting insights into the various different programming languages used in gaming – C++, c#, Python, Java, Javascript and Lua. I’d not heard of Lua until now but it sounds useful. He then went into detail about the varying types of game engine and how they’re useful. My understanding of them is that they do a lot of the grunt work a developer typically would spend a lot of time sorting. I’m assuming things like camera work / model addition / shading etc. Time will tell if I even have the faintest idea of what they really do!

Anyway, onto the work.

First is the game engine, he recommends Unity so lets go get that from unity.com. So apparently you can’t have numerals in a Unity username so I settled on Thirty-Something-Programmer. I told them I wasn’t a robot and agreed to some things and was presented with my nice shiny new account. Oh no wait my password was not strong enough, even though I used 256 characters via the use of KeePassXC. Max characters is 72 so it looks like Unity’s password checker doesn’t give the right response for a password that’s too long! A quick confirmation of the email, confirmed that I wanted the Personal Edition and I was in. It also asked if I wanted to take a break from the dark side theme. Errr no thanks, I like the darkness. I then added in Unity Editor into the same location as Unity. Next we had to setup a new project (once the downloads were complete). So I gave my project a really creative name of C-Sharp-Game, catchy eh? I decided to go with a 2D game with the idea that it’d be easier to manage and my 10-year-old PC could handle it. According the the book, that part of the setup was done and I made a simple shape to just get to grips with things.

Next up is to select a language. In this case it is C#. Like most others, I chose Visual Studio as my IDE, though it already installed as part of my Unity installation I went ahead and added a few extra bits in the hopes I may expand my skillset enough to need them (haha, good one). That was taking an age to download so I thought it smart to use up more bandwidth and watch a video on Unity in the meantime and had a few penny drop moments thanks to Game Maker’s Toolkit.

I also took a minute to set up a GitHub instance – check it out here – GitHub.

With all the prepwork done, I was finally ready to begin and I had a game in mind to create – Snake.