Red Sky


At last Saturday’s Klik of the Month, I started making a game about interior decorating. It ended up being too complex to finish in two hours, so in the last half hour I worked on something else in Unity. Then yesterday, at the regular Cambridge meetup I decided to polish it up a little – I’ve expanded the level, added some background music and given it a name:

[Play Online]

Downloads:
Windows (6.3MB) | OSX Universal (10.6MB) | Unity Source (11.2MB)

I’m starting to get quite comfortable working in Unity! Hopefully soon I’ll be ready to try making something a little more ambitious with it.

* 23 Comments

23 Comments so far

  1. HybridMind on May 19th, 2010

    Good to see this polished up a bit. Glad you kept the red atmosphere and red html background color. It adds so much tension for me to not be able to see the ground. Like exploring inside a gas giant thick with atmosphere. So much more horrifying to slip and fall into the clouds.

    Managed to make it all the way to the bottom of your structure. Not sure if there was something else but had a good time navigating this level.

    I did find a bug with your respawn code that sometimes it can place you in a wall–but not too often.

  2. Chris on May 19th, 2010

    It seems like you’re doing a lot of work in Unity lately. Just curious, how does it compare to Flash? I’m pretty happy with Flixel, but it’s always good to get a sense of what is out there.

  3. Jonah on May 19th, 2010

    Fun stuff. (Good you restrained yourself from making the obvious recursion gag.)

    HybridMind: if you made it to the bottom, you’ve seen about 40% of the structure.

  4. increpare on May 19th, 2010

    Cool. Interesting seeing how the optical stuff compares with feign ( http://www.thegamescollective.org/index.php/topic,46.0.html ).

  5. Paul on May 19th, 2010

    Pretty cool use of colour.

    However, and I don’t know whether this was a design choice or a consequence or playing it online with Unity, but the elephant in the room problem was the horrible non-analog look. That is moving the mouse left and right wouldn’t rotate the view except at obscenely large increments.

    And I understand you’re probably not going to flesh this out further, but some sort of impetus or goal to keep going, like, I don’t know, text on the floors, would help a lot.

  6. Olympi on May 19th, 2010

    Nice work, i love how you brake the rules of “how 3D should be done”, Feign is great too for this, thanks Increpare.

    (a jump key on CTRL would be great for the non qwerty keyboard ;)

  7. Terry on May 19th, 2010

    Thanks!

    @Chris: I’d recommend giving Unity a try, at least – I’m enjoying it quite a lot! There’s still a lot of basic stuff I don’t know how to do with it yet, but it’s by far the best 3D game making tool I’ve ever used. (I did look into doing some basic 3D stuff in flash using papervision last year, but I wasn’t really able to get very far with it. Same with OpenGL.)

    Flash is still my first choice for anything in 2D, though. (Apparently it is possible to do 2D stuff in Unity, but it doesn’t seem to be worth the hassle.)

  8. agj on May 20th, 2010

    Oh, yes. Very nice. Loved the ‘ending’. I first wondered what the hell that thing was, maybe some sort of vehicle, until I was able to recognize the general shape of it.

  9. Shasharala on May 20th, 2010

    Nice! I loved the ending bit and how the 3d dynamics of the game kept me guessing of how to go on up till the very end.

  10. Ian Snyder on May 20th, 2010

    I love this, it reminds me a lot of a game I played as a kid (but can’t remember the name of…)

    The terrain fading into the distance is gorgeous. I wish more 3d games would try to work with untextured surfaces.

  11. snowyowl on May 20th, 2010

    I hate Unity Web Player on Google Chrome.
    Back to the game; it breaks almost every rule in the game design book, and yet it’s compelling enough that I actually got vertigo at one point (specifically, climbing a floating staircase with massive gaps in it right over a crater that I’d been crawling around in minutes earlier). Wow.

  12. Terry on May 20th, 2010

    Thanks guys :)

    (There’s something I really love about these angular single colour polygon environments)

  13. Berbank on May 21st, 2010

    Very stylish. Lovely work. Hope to see you next Tuesday.

  14. Boss on May 22nd, 2010

    Very cool. The mouse sensitivity is really high though, it’s not a problem when you get used to it, but I think most 3D game mouse users are used to making big movements with their right hand. Does unity support control for that?

  15. ortoslon on May 24th, 2010
  16. Terry on May 24th, 2010

    My sidebar/game categorisation system is a little arbitrary, but after a few day’s distance from this project I really feel quite happy with it. I think I’m going to “upgrade” it to a “minor game” :)

  17. Nathanel on June 4th, 2010

    This game is excellent.

    Although I got stuck near the beginning, mostly because of disorientation, I find this game rather easy. And it struck me, that one way of measuring game’s quality is to check proper balance of ‘freshness’ (for lack of a better word) and difficulty. This freshness is some exotic game mechanic, or very strange concept, or artistic vision, generally, something that first makes us curious and draws us to the game, but also what repels us from playing it longer. Difficulty may make us angry at the beginning, but also stimulates and moderates our progress, giving us the satisfaction of beating the difficulty. Terry you hit the ideal spot of equilibrium between ‘freshness’ and difficulty. Again. :)

    I find it annoying that there is no ‘invert mouse’ option anywhere in Unity 3d games, but oh well.

  18. rockist on June 20th, 2010

    Sweet jesus that left me anxious

  19. mhm on June 23rd, 2010

    i have a qustion, whats the point of the game, just explore?

  20. Art on August 7th, 2010

    When I play most of the games I get so addicted to the music that by the time i reach the end it’s hard to turn it off

  21. Feryl on August 12th, 2010

    The music is by Brother Android. You can download his albums here: http://brotherandroid.110mb.com/

    The game itself is decent. A proper ending might have been better if it had been done right, but it’s O.K. that it forces the player to stop and think about what it truly is.

  22. Matthew on August 14th, 2010

    I keep getting stuck in the walls!

  23. Terry on August 14th, 2010

    Sorry about that, the respawning is totally broken, sadly. The problem is really simple too; I used ints instead of doubles, so it kinda snaps to a grid when it respawns, which is sometimes inside a wall.

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