Merlin’s Prefab Lab available in the Asset Store!

We have worked hard on this, and now it’s finally there! Merlin’s Prefab Lab is an extension to the game engine Unity. It greatly improves your art pipeline by keeping your models and prefabs linked when they update.

Merlin's Prefab Lab

Ever had to update dynamic models linked with scripts and components? It is painful and tedious. Merlin’s Prefab Lab completely automates this process, which saves time and keeps you sane.

The Prefab Lab does 3 things:

1- It makes prefabs for your models;

2- When you update your models, it updates the prefabs without destroying their context;

3- It keeps components and game objects linked to models.

This is great for dynamic models such as characters, cars, and any model that has particles, animations or scripts attached to it. You can now prototype with temporary models, add all the goodies, and update your model without having to think about all the components and Game Objects that normally break when you do so. The Prefab Lab has been a real timesaver for us. It keeps the peace between artists (who want to improve their work) and programmers (who don’t have the time to update all the links of 3D models with every little art commit).

Merlin’s Prefab Lab is available for $50 in the Asset Store. You can check it out in the Extensions section. We hope you like it as much as we do!

For support and information, please mail us at merlin@paladinstudios.com. We will be happy to assist you!

Use the right tools for the job

Let me start a with bold statement: Apple Macs suck. To be more precise, I don’t like OS X and I don’t care about cool window animations, fading etc. I’m the guy who likes Windows and still uses the classic theme.

Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to blog about today ;-)

As you probably know, we have forced our self to learn the iPhone platform in two weeks. To do so we had a great idea: “Hey, Paladin Studios is a game company, why not make a game?” If you want to achieve anything interesting in such a sort time, you need to use the right tools. Normally we use a lot of tools like Pivotaltracker, SVN, Paint .Net, Visual Studio, Max and Unity.

To put in another bold statement: Unity rocks! It’s a 3D engine which allows you to use C# for programming. To use their marketing one-liner: “Taking the pain out of game development” which means you can concentrate on the gameplay and not having to do all rendering, physics etc yourself. It does take (most) of the pain out of game development. As an example why we love Unity I’m going to show you the simple and speedy way we can create and test scenario’s.

A scenario is no more then a bunch of settings on our Obstacle Factory which has one job: spawn objects. The Unity editor allows us to play our game and change that bunch of settings while it keeps running. As pictures tell more then words…

Top: Scene editor Bottom: Playing game Left: All objects in scene and project files Right: Object settings editor

Zoomed in on the object settings for the Obstacle Factory. There are a bunch of scenes, some settings and a check to override the current scene and let it use the settings we tweak realtime. Spawn type Pathed is really cool btw.

To break it down, Unity is the tool for us. The iPhone version is Mac only, which makes sense.

Too bad I can’t use Paint .Net and Visual Studio anymore though…

Listen to your testers

Last Friday we put all the artwork and gameplay we had so far together to create a playable demo. The idea was to let a couple of testers play the game and listen to what they had to say. Like always, there were both positive and negative comments.

One biggy was that the main gameplay, the color picking and dodging objects, was too difficult and hard to explain correctly.

We had four options at this point:

  1. Do nothing and continue the game plan
  2. Remove the color picking
  3. Remove the dodging
  4. Cry like a little girl, wèèh, and give up

We chose option 2.

As a result of just having one main gameplay element we have more room to polish and tweak the final release, which is this Friday already. I am confident the game will benefit from this decision. So keep this in mind: always listen to your testers !

iPhone game: random pictures time!

To make up for the radio silence yesterday, here are a bunch of pictures of the design and development process.

Niels and Lukas are checking out some of the thematic designs.

Lukas is setting up collision in our favorite programming environment, Unity.

We describe everything that needs to be done using a great free tool called Pivotal Tracker.

Here Thomas is sketching a few characters.

Tijmen is trying to figure out what is up and down on his iPod Touch.

A few more concept sketches. Will these elements end up in the game? We’re not sure yet!

A first prototype of the game showing circles and colors!

Hello World!

Whenever you are developing on a platform which is completely new to you, you have to start with getting “Hello world” on your screen. It always gives you that nice little feeling of ‘Victory!’ when achieving that. Since we at Paladin don’t make an exception to this rule, I present you:

Exciting, isn’t it? ;-)