This is a throw-back to our original Precursors C++ client, rewritten entirely in Unity, as a project for me to learn Unity with.
The last official build of (any iteration of) Precursors we last released was
v0.3.3. It had:
- Some (wonky) Physics
- The Ares model
- Engine glow
- Firing of a single plasma ball
- Mouse Look movement
- The first version of our "Asteroids Level"
- Basic GUI
- No networking
To get there, it took us ~700 commits, and 582 days. I recreated it (except for the GUI) in Unity in about 8 hours. Doing a simple (not beat for beat) GUI (based on our old sprite sheet and some re-exported SVGs) added another 6 hours to the total.
Needless to say, that was a bit humbling.
Ok, so I said to my self, let's kick it up a notch, and maybe get it as far as any version of the project has EVER gotten? That means networked multiplayer and chat.
The networking never really worked over the internet, so let's just call it 'local multiplayer'.
This is not a return to active work on Precursors. Sure, I might be able to, on my own, get further than the project has ever gotten, but that doesn't mean that I can take it anywhere near "complete". There's a lot of fundamentals missing, and a lot of flaws with the initial concept. Precursors as envisioned in 2004 will never come to be.
Another point: This is not a game. Not in a technical sense; there's no win condition, and no lose condition. The original never had one, so I am not going to add one in this version.
This is tribute to all the iterations of this game that have ever existed. I'm using assets from every version, some because they're better, others because It's all i've had.
None of the assets in this is fully original to this version, all of it are just modified versions of old items. That's intentional, and desired; as I said, this is a tribute, not an active project; I want everything to be recycled bits and ideas from our unfinished attempts.
So why do this at all? Well, that's easy: Precursors has always been a unicorn for me to chase, an idea that has burned in my brain for a long, long time. So I have a lot of love for the long hours we put into writing our crappy code and learning how to build games. This is nostalgic for me, so I love seeing it in a new light.
But, at the end of the day, this is an example project for me to learn Unity and figure out how to build a real game in it.
This particular code base, and everything contained in this repository is probably destined for the dustbin. While nostalgic, representing thousands of man hours... it was all temporary. We knew we weren't good at models, or textures, or UI.
But this unicorn, the idea it represents will live on, and give birth to a lot of other things. Hell, all of my professional carreer is built on the back of this game. In a way, everything I've ever done with code has been to further this project. So no, it's not dead. Not even a little
Unicorns can never die.