blog @ pebbl

Most definitely A Long Way Till Morning

I can't quite believe that after another period of indeterminacy I've managed to cobble together yet another step forward on my path to creating a worthy online/offline platform adventure game... Obviously over all this time I've been developing game assets, which takes a lot of energy, but I haven't made much progress in the way of a Game Engine; beyond what I've tinkered with in the HTML5 space.

That's recently changed all thanks to Unity and their latest 2D release.

Unity (the Game development tool, not the Microsoft "extensible dependency injection container") is something I've had my eye on ever since it first started. It popped up at the time where I wasn't sure if I was going to invest time into building my own 2D platform engine in Flash, JavaScript or perhaps something else... I stumbled across their homepage and was rather impressed with the types of games they had running from within a browser environment.

At the time however it was much more geared towards 3D, so much so that after downloading the dev environment I found myself getting lost in the likes of Blender, 3D meshes, Shaders (if you think usual programming languages are gobbledygook, try Shaders) and fighting with 3D Cameras and Lights to appear 2D, whilst keeping pixel definition. So after getting frustrated I left my .unity project files to gather dust, but I signed up to the Unity mailing list and kept an eye on new releases.

Unity 4.3

Nothing much happened in the way to interest me, with my specific requirements, for a good number of years.. that is, until they released Unity 4.3 with added 2D support. To cut a long story short I downloaded the upgraded version and within a month of weekends I've imported my assets using a mixture of Spine and 2DToolKit, and have got a rough parallax demo up and running with simulated physics out of the box:

Unity Demo (A = left, D = right, Space = jump).

I still have a lot to tweak, and getting the camera to stop scaling with different window sizes is my first priority, but the main thing that Unity has help me with is to make easy all the things I would have found very time consuming and tricky to balance cross-device — like physics, lighting and layer effects... the downside being that it has quite a steep learning curve and all the things I would have found easy in either Flash or HTML5 are now the difficult things — Text handling, GUI adornments, asset loading and management, pixel perfection and pixel collisions... But hey, if it was too simple I probably wouldn't enjoy doing this in the first place.

You'd..

Just thought I'd write a short post about the pointlessness of trying to get a refund from the differing UK train operators; for one to blow off steam, and for two to laugh at the whole ridiculousness of the situation.

Like..

I have tried a grand total of three times — across the entirety of all my thirty one years — to get my money back from these purveyors of uncomfortable journeys. Time that would have been better spent, it would seem, learning to yodel. I would have ended up with the same result, no money back, but at least I could communicate the reasons why I might be running late across vast distances.

A..

It seems that for most companies, where there is an actual public facing staff — that are not locked away behind glass — and a realistic threat of competition; you can get a refund if the service you paid for was not provided, or was just less than satisfactory. I have experienced this across a wide range of businesses, almost instantaneously upon asking, from supermarkets, to cinemas; clothing retailers to gadget emporiums... and even decent train companies like Eurostar.

Unfortunately, all that many of our prized transport hubs can generally offer is a worried, ill-prepared individual encased in perspex — or hiding in a cupboard — who can rarely give any help beyond pre-scripted issues. It can be even less fortunate for yourself if you happen to trigger one of these pre-scripted responses, because it will usually involve being handed a thin leaflet of some kind. This is exactly what happens when you mention in passing that the specific train you've opted for has unexpected evaporated, and that due to communication being so bad — what with all this new fangled technology lying about the place — you haven't been able to find out when and from which direction the next chariot of standing-room-only will be coming from... All of which has led you to the curious but surely understandable feeling of wanting your money back.

..What?

All I can say is, DO NOT FILL OUT THAT FORM! You will be wasting your precious life, and unless we are talking hundreds of pounds, where the hope alone of getting it back might be worth it, you will really just be exercising one arm of a business that makes it their business to hold on to as much money as they possibly can. You know, for share-holders and the like...

Instead — if you can — go back to the leaflet wielding helper and ask for your ticket to be shifted to another day, that is if you can face the possibility of the same thing happening all over again.

If you decide not to heed my warning though, and it isn't a snow day, I shall tell you what will happen next. After an indeterminate amount of spacetime you will get some, little or no correspondence kindly informing you that your request has been denied, rejected, forgotten about, then — and only then — buried in soft peat BY the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal... Feeding the beast alone has cost more than the £24 you wanted back, so you now in fact owe them money.

... either that or they'll just tell you your journey wasn't delayed for more than 30 minutes, when quite obviously they were there and you weren't.

With special thanks to Southern Trains, South West Trains and Clapham Junction.