I made a 3D Rubik's cube game in 1998 using openGL as part of college work. You could see all six sides simultaneously (two views of 3 sides each) and rotate any row or column. It was pretty usable given you had to use a mouse to rotate.

That was over 40 years ago. It was called "Water Carrier". It created a random labyrinth with an entry on the left and an exit on the right, and a number of puddles in it. You could not cross the puddles, but had to "pick them up" with your bucket. Of course, only one puddle fit in that bucket, so you had to empty it at the entrance in order to scoop up the next puddle on your way to the exit. For scoring, it counted the number of steps one needed to get through.

The labyrinth was one of the algorithmic challenges I had as a kid. There was no internet to look up algorithms like that, and the local libraries had no computer related books. So I invented the algorithm myself. Same with sorting, for the "high scores", which were actually "low scores", the less steps you needed, the better. For that, I "invented" what I many years later learned was Bubble Sort.

And sorry, no link to it ;-)

It's not python, but it wasn't bad, either. More importantly, it was all I had.

then we got a Win '95 box and with it Heroes of Might and Magic.

RIP, your desire to study. lol

That's a wild upbringing IMO. You had access to a computer at a young age, and you stunk with learning computer languages over the years. That's impressive in my book. Also, coding in BASIC... sheesh. I wouldn't have the patience to code in that computer language.

A shitty platformer in gamemaker with great music, but the music is an mp3 of a popular song I downloaded on Limewire.

TIL: Game Maker is 25 years old.

I'd say they're both video games. Though I'm hesitant to call painting a labyrinth in Paint[brush] a video game. But, you were using a screen in your interaction, soooo...

Probably one with a jumping ball I made in Game Maker with my cousin about 20 years ago. Unless drawing a labyrinth in Paintbrush on Windows 3.11 and controlling the cursor through it with the arrow keys count for anything? Then it'll be about 25 years.

I made a clone of Drug Wars in BASIC on the Commodore 64 in...1993? 94? Thereabouts. I have the floppy but no drive that can read a 5¼ disk. I taught myself to type on that beast and then I taught myself BASIC from the book that came with the (used) system when we bought it.

My second game was a text adventure in BASIC that used GOSUB to spawn mobs, heavily inspired by the MUDs I had just started getting access to by taking a course on using the Internet at the local college. I never finished it, because then we got a Win '95 box and with it Heroes of Might and Magic.

My next several dozen games were made using ZZT, with one or two browser-based mixed-text-and-image adventures thrown in as I was also learning webdev.

Oh wait! No, my first couple games were made on Hypercard in the 1992-3 schoolyear when I first tested into the gifted program and started getting consistent weekly access to a computer lab.

Anyway, that brings me through the end of highschool, and in college I learned so many more languages but also had a lot less time for game dev.

I made a terrible idle clicker game when unity screwed it's users and Godot got a massive rise in popularity. Did it just to see how Godot works.

The game has no art and no saving system. Still had fun poking around with Godot.

My first video game was a tic-tac-toe written in Ding basic (a specialized language for learning programming and creating games). That was 15 years ago.

Honestly, I am pretty shocked at how simple and easy it was to apply the patch. Kinda surprising from the Unity team, but a welcome surprise, to be sure.

LOL yeah, they took this seriously and handled it well

I didn't want to take any Risks. So did the fix first thing in the morning and had QAs doing tests all morning. Pushed the fixed build after lunch. The fix was really simple with a Unity made tool. It was actually clear and understandable, unlike the messes Unity usually ships.

Interesting, can you pass arbitrary command line arguments via a URL like that on Windows? If so, this could be catastrophic if all you need is a malicious link on any website to trigger it.

The attack is through other unrelated apps that get installed, so if some shitty todo app gets compromised the rest of the games that use the unpatched runtime can be targeted. Yes, the risks are probably pretty minimal, but app permissions on android are not well-known for their sensibility.

Also on windows:

your Unity app could be vulnerable to privilege escalation if it is registered as a custom URL schema handler.

I see, but still - how is that different from a regular old .dll injection? Or, just replacing the .exe alltogether.

If you're at the point of R/W/X on a machine, then you have a lot of similar vectors of attack.

That is, assuming there's no privilege escalation, which the vuln report does not mention.

Apparently the biggest risk is that another malicious application could modify the intent urls of the runtime to pass extra arguments to the command line and run arbitrary code whenever you start a unity game. Apparently permissions could be escalated on windows but only if you registered the app as a custom URL schema handler

It’s an easy attack vector to drain crypto wallets!

Switching engines sometimes is a good idea. If you can rough estimate the timelines for both engines you might be surprised. Just don't absolutely commit with analysis. Your time estimates will be wrong but they both will be wrong based on the same assumptions.

I had considered transferring it to Unreal. I'm for sure going to be using Unreal for any future games I might make. The blueprint system looks great and has up to date documentation and tutorials. But it seems like switching engines might set my project back even more.

This might be overkill for your project but you already have the hard part of making a game in unreal figured out. You can model and animate. You can get really really far in Unreal without coding at all, just by using Blueprints(visual scripting). Look into making a game in Unreal Engine with Blueprints only.

In my opinion, for your situation, AI is not going to help if you don't know enough programming ALREADY, what is probably going to happen is that you're going to achieve a certain progress and then get stuck.

I suggest you take a look at no code/low code solutions since your game does sound not too hard to make.

Take a look at rpg maker and construct 3

You'll be able to use AI for the scripting you'll need.

I had a friend use rpg maker with success in the first years of high school, before "the internet" was available, and he knew nothing about programming (he's now a doctor)

This looks bigger than a weekend project, but doesn't seem insanely huge. I think there's probably a fair bit of complexity hiding in those enemy interactions though...

Looking at the demo reel, the wire mesh walls could be problematic -- is the flashlight supposed to be noticeable by enemies through the mesh? Can the enemies path to the player? Getting that to feel right could be tricky.

How exactly are the enemies supposed to move around the map? Also, are there only one of each of the four types, or are there multiple instances? (Is getting past each one its own self-contained encounter?) Do you have the whole thing essentially mapped out already (e.g. from whatever you made for your demo reel) or is the real level design TODO?

Another thought that came to mind looking at your GDD is that you're missing sound effects for things like ball hitting (various materials), and footsteps on (various materials) that you'll likely want to have.

I don't think I'm the right person to take it on -- you probably want someone with more, uh, mainstream 3D engine experience. I am curious what you used to produce the demo reel though.

the gdd makes it sound simple enough since you mostly just need simple bots to nav around and a small amount of scripting, hopefully someone here would be kind enough to take a look at it for you (or reccomend some addons for which ever engine youre using)

I can link the game design doc I put together a while ago. I can also link my demo reel which shows a bit of the game in it. Game design doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fop7yNvhnxam-apBTn6JviC3xLA5DA5h-kDE7GqtEQM/edit?usp=drivesdk

Demo reel (the game can be seen in the clips marked CH 05):https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TGbW56UFDTaohnO8qBodsnDhvxR03xQZ/view?usp=drivesdk

honestly, my objections to ai code is less about ethics, and more about it being shit code that needs a fair bit of finesse from someone who knows what they're doing to get something actually usable. for your use case, it might work, and you have my permission as a random stranger to give it a shot. (but i hope you find a coder to work with cause i think it would result in a much better game for you).