I recently tried to make a text based tutorial for making a Lobby system in Photon. It did not work out that well. I am just not that good with doing long series. I would rather just do one thing and it get all over and done with. This video is a complete tutorial for making a lobby system in Unity using Photon. This is going to be a programming tutorial; not a UI tutorial. The UI I made for this tutorial is not good but that is not the point. This tutorial should help you learn how to implement the lobby system in a way that should allow you to make it look better later. I hope you like the tutorial.
Dark Room and getting a start on game engines
I really didn't hit the ground running when it came to this whole blogging thing. Although this is a problem that I have with a lot of things: I say that I am going to do something, I get started on it, and then I don't do it. I'm sure that I am not the only person to have this problem but that does not make it any less annoying.
But I did finish one thing I set out to do, finish a game. You can check out Dark Room on my github page: https://github.com/Barret5Ocal/DarkRoom-. It honestly isn't much. It is just a game where the player explores an invisible unending maze. Most people would wonder why the game was even made. Well, here's your explanation.
About a month or maybe a month and a half ago, I was feeling pretty down on myself. I was feeling like my life wasn't really going anywhere and that I was trapped by my social awkardness. I felt the need to just finish something no matter how small it was, so I came up with Dark Room. Dark Room was designed to be a small game that I could finish up in about a month. I think it took me a little longer, but that's alright since I learned a lot.
The main educational goal of Dark Room was to get a foot in the door on OpenGL. I had never made anything with OpenGL before, so I need something small that even I could do so that I could get more familar with the library. I also needed to actually make something that was a finished product, even if it is barely a finished product. Dark Room was the first step to being a better engine programmer, now the big question is: "what next?".
The next game that I'm going to do is a 2v2 FPS bullet hell type thing. That might sound weird but the actual details about the design don't really matter for this peice. What I want to talk about is the reasons I choose this design. First off, I wanted to move from 2D to 3D. I probably could make more 2D games and that would be easier, but I wouldn't have learned that much more about rendering if I did. 3D will provide tougher challenges. Second off, I decided that this project will use zero assets. I made a single sprite for Dark Room. I was going to make a whole set of animations for it, but I got tired of the whole process fairly quickly. Honestly, I have no desirer to be a artist, and I would rather focus on my programming. This next game will ownly use basic shapes and colors to represent things.
I going to be spending the next week or so studying up on 3D rendering in OpenGL, and I plan to hopefully right up so blog post about what I learned, so I better get started.
A start on blogging
I really need to start writing more. I don't really feel comfortable talk about myself online... or in person. I guess this blog will be a great place to start talking about the things that I am doing in my life. It will mostly be about the stuff that make. I am a c/c++ programmer in my spare time, and I want to work as a game designer. To many of these sentences are starting with "I"; lets just start.
My current project is a twitch bot written in c++. My favorite thing about it so far is that it has basically no dependincies. I implimented the net code myself, so I didn't have to use anything like curl. The biggest problem that I have faced so far was getting the regular expression code. I wanted an easy to use library, and I found one. Only problem, it didn't work. The library written in c and expirimental. The programmer who made it told me that it was unfinished after I contacted him. Instead of waiting for the library to be done, I fixed that library myself. The thing I ended up with is a half implemented library that works only for the extact thing I need it to do, which is good enough for me.
The rest of the difficulties came from having to learn how the twitch chat system works. The twitch docs are not sufficant enough, so I have to read the IRC documents since the twitch chat is a modified version of that.
I ran out of things to say, so I'm going to end it here.