Last week we did something very different – we went back to high school! Cathy and I spoke at James Cardinal McGuigan Catholic Secondary School in Toronto to nearly 200 kids over 4 class periods about how we make video games.

Part of our mission here at Rocket 5 is that we want to teach kids and parents that there’s more to video games than just playing them and that kids might want to consider a future in the industry that provides them with so much fun and entertainment. There are tons of different job skills that are needed to make video games in areas ranging from the very creative to the very technical, so you might be surprised to learn that some things you’re already interested in might help you get a job working in the games industry someday.… More »

In This installment of our 2D tutorial series, we will be adding enemy AI to our Lode Runner clone using A* Pathfinding. This post has been guest written by Adrian Seeto of Fun Mob Games who was also kind enough to write the AI scripts that are a huge part of bringing the game to life.

Adding the enemy AI required changes to many of the scripts that we added in the previous tutorials. You can download the complete project here which has been rebuilt to support the new prefab system in Unity 3.5x. If you’re using an older version of Unity (pre 3.5), then you should download this version. You can also follow the steps below to update your existing project.… More »

This past weekend we took part in the 10th installment of the Game Prototype Challenge, a monthly game jam billed as “a spur of the moment motivator for making games”. Not that we need any motivation since we’re always working on games here. But what we like about jams is that they get us to think about games differently since they usually involve including some kind of theme (“dreams” and “collectibles” for this jam) and they always have a very short deadline which gets us to try new things quickly without worrying about making the code necessarily clean or efficient.

Rocket 5 participated in GPC v.2 earlier this year with our game Snowball Jones And The Last Crusade, which I co-developed with Kevin Feraday.… More »

This is part 4 of our tutorial series on making a 2D game in Unity3D with freely available tools and plugins. Part 1 introduced you to the tools we’re using, in Part 2 we built our first level and in Part 3 we hooked up the control scripts and setup the ladders and ropes so that the player can navigate levels. In this article we’re going to create a pickup item, hook up the scoring system and add the interface text which reports score, lives and level.

Hopefully you already went through part 2 and part 3 of the series, if you haven’t already you might want to go back and do them now so everything in this part will make sense.… More »