Interactive tabletop playing surface (Space Hulk Hobby Challenge)

Unity is both frustrating and wonderful to write games on.

For simple, pick-up-n-play mobile apps, it can be brilliant. But for a game like this, where the player selects an action (in our case it just so happens to be by picking up a playing piece and putting it down on some dedicated hardware) and then the responses are played back exactly, it can be pretty frustrating.

Of course, once one player has taken a turn, it’s important that we can record exactly what happened, and in what sequence, so that it can be played back on the other player’s device, when it’s their turn to play.

So far getting this exactly right has gone from a labour of love to a headache and a chore!

I’m using the Unity Toon Soldiers (https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/characters/humanoids/toon-soldiers-52220) as proxies for my Space Marines (ssshhh, don’t tell GW, I’ve heard they can get a bit upset at players using proxy models).

These great little characters come with a selection of weaspons – handguns, assault rifles and so on. With a little creativity, it’s easy enough to swap out bullets for lasers, to bring them up into the 41st century.

But one thing I’ve been having a lot of fun coding up are weapons that behave very differently to “regular bullet-based” ballistics. Like flamethrowers. With “real work” and other things, finding time to work on the project is hard enough as it is. But when I do finally get a few hours to write code, I find myself giggling at the Beasts of War crew dressed up as Space Marines, burning everything in their path on my sandbox test system!

Sure, like every software project, this thing is dangerously close to missing the deadline because of “mission creep”. But when you’re spending hours and hours trying to solve parabolic equations (those grenades don’t just appear on the map you know!) even the smallest of things can bring a little light relief.

I really must knuckle down and get the actual gameplay sorted out.

So far things are looking pretty good on the computer screen – one last push and it should be on a smartphone/tablet in the near future….