Early Days

This blog post is about some of my earliest projects.

Bink

Bink was created in 2015 as a random word to put in the company field of an app I was testing. Since then, Bink has become the front for all my work

The logo for Bink was created in 2016 for a school project. It was later animated rotating in Blender to put on my first personal website in 2018. Before this, I had made a few other websites for other people but this one was the first I had made for myself. I hosted it on my Raspberry Pi and registered the sub-domain bink.voltage.nz for free using freedns.afraid.org.

I used this website to post tests of a character controller I was making in unity. I got my friends to try it and give me feedback. In 2019 I had to make a website for another school project. I chose to make a blogging website. In doing so I learnt how to use PHP and MySQL effectively. The site featured a much improved look, a working account register and login page with encrypted passwords, a page for each user where they could post whatever they wanted, a simple comment system and it stored cookies somewhat insecurely to remember who's logged in. It was a great website but it was in no way free of security and design flaws.

Unity

In 2014 I got my first computer. It was one of those white MacBook Pros that were made of plastic. I got unity on this computer but it just sat there because I didn't know how to use it and it was so slow. Later in 2016, I got a 2012 MacBook pro for school. This computer was much more powerful and could handle Unity. I can't remember what encouraged me to look back into unity again, but for whatever reason, I chose to give it another go. It was at this time I made my first 'Game'. At the time I didn't know how useful tutorials were so I just got to experimenting. This was how I approached most new things but I wouldn't recommend it. You end up having to do a lot more work and often miss very crucial steps. Using the Unity asset store and the sample assets I managed to cobble together a game without using a single line of code. In Bayswater (that's what I named it) the sample third person character chases you using Unity's pathing system. If it touches you the level resets.

After this, I made a few other projects and got better at using unity. At one point I found out about tutorials and I could create small unfinished projects at an unprecedented rate. Eventually, I made my second game, this game was made using Brackeys multiplayer fps tutorial. It was around this time that I started getting quite confident at C#. While I did follow a tutorial to make this game I improvised with a lot of it and even switched from Unity's multiplayer system to PUN. After I finished the multiplayer project I wanted to make a better character controller. This was the first project I did where I not only got the project to work but I worked on polishing the project. I learnt quite a lot form doing this and ended up with a animated moving character that could walk, run, crouch and jump.