Monday 28 July 2014

Beginning A Procedural City in Unity



The title pretty much sums up the point of this post, though it doesn't really explain why I'm posting it. I suppose I retain a sense of wanting to be a good guy in a world that is increasingly choked by the smoke of the pillaging hordes and rampant whores. My blog - this blog - is daily swamped by a deluge of spam and unwanted emails from web marketers who would destroy it and everything I create in the search for the last grimy penny. I now rarely check my emails, not that many people email. All accounts bar the one I keep private for friends and family have become inundated with the electronic effluent of a thousand installations of MailChimp, which must surely rank alongside the Channel 5 and landmines as one of the world's most terrible inventions.

It's the way of the world, I suppose. This is a world run by men and women who would shoot down airliners full of people to make some baseless political point or lob missiles across borders simply to further their warped ideology.

My last week was somehow symbolised by a woman I saw walking across our local down square. She had a large tattoo of Audrey Hepburn on the back of her calf. Had Audrey Hepburn been alive today, she might have approved. I don't know. It's not that I dislike tattoos because I like rebellion and I identify strongly with outsider culture. But their ubiquity has ruined that. It just sometimes feels like I possess the last untattooed flesh in town, which makes me the outsider and that's sometimes a lonely place to be. I find myself living for the next PJ Harvey album, news of Spark's next tour, or an utterance from Stewart Lee.

I ramble but I've not written prose in so long. They're ideas I'd like to address in the game I'm currently building but I don't suppose I will. I'm aiming to cast current 'big idea' at the heart of the mainstream. I'm about a month or so into the project and I have the basics of the game in place. This video details just the last two days of hard work, learning to create a procedural city in Unity. It probably won't entertain or seem remotely interesting to anybody but this is the stuff that excites me as I walk around my town, inhaling the 'vape' of electronic and real cigarettes, amid the boorish bald circus strongmen, with their tribal tattoos vining their way up their veining necks. Yes, my thinking is reductive and I reach easily for the stereotype. But from killers to politicians, this is a time of stereotypes and very little originality. It's a world that makes shiteaters of us all.

3 comments:

  1. That looks like fun. Haven't tried to write programs since I swapped my Amiga for a PC 20-odd years ago but you've inspired me to try again. Unity is now downloading. Wish me luck" :-)

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  2. Ah, it's immense fun and would probably be more fun if I weren't so ambitious. When I started, I thought I'd be happy to write something as simple as Flappy Bird and now look at me.

    And good luck. Unity can be extremely satisfying once you get past the initial learning curve. Makes me think I should really do a video about how I start a project, rather than showing things that are working.

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  3. In a Starbucks, I laughed out loud after reading, "...MailChimp, which must surely rank alongside the Channel 5 and landmines as one of the world’s most terrible inventions." A couple of middle-aged ladies looked up almost immediately, thinking that I had been eaves-dropping on their witty conversation. They were very pleased with themselves.

    If they had been 20-something hot chicks, I'd be thanking you.

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