December 31, 2013
in category Projects and tags unity3d, shiva3d
By Robert Utter
After Techtonic Games went bust, I returned to university to finish my degree, where I was invited to return to Chico State Game Studios as a technical advisor.
At the time, CSGS had switched engines and was using Shiva3D. Though I was sad to see the days of big-team, big-dream Unreal projects go, I think it was best for the program, and in fact I now encourage them to scale down their designs even further: a small, finished game strikes me as a better piece than an unpolished dream.
A semester later, I was one of a few students who rebuilt the current project in Unity3D. I give you the racing game formerly known as Furiously Fast.
The game should be compatible with PC and Unity WebPlayer, but for now it's available for Android.
I was more closely involved with older CSGS projects, but I still had a few responsibilities:
- Train students to better use Lua (and, more recently, C#).
- Advise students on the technical feasibility of their designs.
- Help with implementation and troubleshooting of particularly difficult or irksome features.
Generally, that means I spend my time in the "scary basement" of whatever apps they're asking me about.
I'm still on-call for any problems with the program's project server, which is running Redmine and Subversion. I've written up a "runbook" for whoever follows after me, in the hope that they'll have a better idea of what's going on with the system.