The tools of the trade - making do with 17 year old software!
Today's morning report was delayed as I tried to get a model to use for some cargo. It's one of those simple jobs that highlights the extra difficulties poor indie game devs have versus proper studios with actual budgets!
Unity offers a store of assets you can use, including some free assets. So I popped on there and found a nice weapon crate to use as a cargo drop. This fitted nicely into ionAXXIA, until I added some rotation - the crate was designed for placement on floors in ground-based games, so its pivot wasn't centred and my rotations caused the object to move around. I thus needed to edit the mesh. Oh dear...
This is where your development tools come in. Not Unity, which offers superb functionality and remains up to date for free to help out budding developers until they are making money, but the other tools like image editing, 3D model creation, audio engineering and video editing. The professional tools for these tasks have professional pricetags, running into the thousands for the mainstream applications like Maya or Adobe Premiere. That leaves the no-budget indie like myself using whatever free tools are available or consumer-grade software or old software you have lying around.
For my image editing, instead of using the industry standard PhotoShop, I'm using Jasc's PaintShopPro from the year 2000, given away free on a magazine coverdisk (if you were around to know what those were!). Functionally it's superb and to be honest I'm in no rush to replace it, although its vector abilities could be improved.
Paint Shop Pro version 4 from the year 2000 - still awesome!
For 3D, I'm using a copy of Realsoft3D I bought second hand for personal use many years ago, last updated 2005. I love the workflow of this software and it lets me model and render my ship sprites, but it can't do object export for games so I can't use it for 3D.
Realsoft 3D from 2005 - very clean interface and intuitive tools. Great software, sadly no longer developed
Which leaves me looking at the free tools, where the go-to is called Blender and it is, IMHO, one of the most atrocious interfaces ever! Its learning curve makes the Matterhorn look like a speed-bump. There's no way to use Blender without learning it, and I just don't have time. Thankfully there are enough tutorials and YouTube videos that I could discover how to change my crate model and make it work.
Blender - about as easy as learning to swim by jumping into Orca infested freezing Arctic waters wearing concrete boots
Thus the job of getting a model box into my game took far longer than it would if I had access to the tools expected of the job, which explains a little in part for why things keep taking longer than I say they will!
