Indie Game Developer

Developer Profile: Neil Carter.

Neil Carter is an award winning indie game developer. He's currently enjoying using Unity for his new game Phoenix Final. His website is Nether.org.uk.

Who are you?

I'm a designer working in retail interiors, and I also teach CAD and 3D modelling to university students. I spend my free time working on my games, as well as drawing cartoons and comic artwork.

I have been dabbling with computer games since the days of the Commodore 64, Sinclair Spectrum and Amiga, and I've made three games for the Mac in the last few years. My most recent games, Yoink and Rescue, were both winners in the uDevGames contest.

What game are you working on now?

Phoenix Final is a space shooter which is the culmination of a few years' worth of ideas. You and your squadron of fighters are tasked with the destruction of an ever-advancing fleet of leviathan warships and their defence forces.

It's loosely based upon my first Mac game, Super Phoenix, which is an intentionally stylised and simplified shoot 'em up. Phoenix Final will also have a unique, pared-back visual style. The idea is to make the visuals more minimal to allow more attention to be focussed upon the gameplay.

What's the production plan?

Since I'm making this game in my free time, it's progressing slowly but steadily. I expect to have an in-progress preview version released shortly, but the final version is likely to take until the end of 2006 (and maybe longer).

Which other apps are you using for the project?

I'm using Cheetah3D for all the main modelling at the moment. I plan to use FormZ for some of the more difficult or refined parts of the modelling, but so far Cheetah3D has been quite sufficient and a joy to use. I also wrote a custom UV mapping script for Cheetah3D to simplify the process of mapping the stylised textures onto my models.

All the textures and other visual elements have been produced in Photoshop CS. At this time, my sound effects have all been borrowed from other projects, but I expect I'll make sounds using Reason when I get around to it.

What was the best part of the Unity experience?

The ease of the import process has been a great benefit, and has made me much less reluctant to create new game assets than I have been on pre-Unity projects. Also, I've found the support and advice from the OTEE guys to be extremely helpful and informative.

The other important thing is that Unity has made many of the boring parts of game development fun again!

What obstacles did you run into?

Some things continue to be difficult no matter what development environment I use. AI is difficult, some kinds of relationship between objects are difficult to figure out. Nothing is insurmountable, but sometimes it takes a long time to find the right route through a particular problem.