Red Recondite

I recently had an idea for a weird ‘huge’ game that would combine a bunch of different ideas together, so I thought I’d try to see what I could spin up with Unity. I’ve heard of it mentioned favorably, and I really haven’t tried to do any non-Dink Smallwood related game development since Torque2d (Surgery Slice).

Before getting too far into creating a game that may-or-may-not-be-feasible, I decided to to create a super tiny prototype toy called ‘USS QWERTY‘. And here I thought I was a unique snowflake, but I just thought to check, and there are at least 21 other references to ‘USS QWERTY’. Alas.

USS QWERTY lets you command a keyboard/starship over NGC 6188 and NGC 6164. There’s no goal, plot, or anything else of the sort, but it seems to do what I wanted fairly well. You can ‘play’ it in a browser here.

I was surprised at how… easy this all was. It seems great so far:

• Unity uses C#.
• There’s a really nice design/play feedback loop; make a change, click play, try it, make another change, click play, try it again.
• The documentation is really excellent; videos, tooltips, great documents describing what everything is (like a ‘Rigidbody 2d’).
• I created something that ‘works’ in less than a day.

But I did run into a couple small issues:

• At one point, I thought I broke my script when nothing responded to the keyboard. I spent a while trying to debug my script, but it ended up being some sort of ‘Unity’ issue; closing and restarting resolved the issue.
• I had a heck of a time trying to build the application for WebGL. It gave me several cryptic error messages. Restarting my PC resolved this.
• When running the windows version, with Very Low or Low graphics, the physics are all out of control.

Still, though, very nice. I may end up trying to turn USS QWERTY into an actual game, as I continue working through ideas.