Ok so I needed a distraction so I might have a go at this tower defence challenge at Gamedev. I've been meaning to have a play with Unity .. I'm a c++ guy who tends to do *everything* themselves, so this is quite a change using a rapid development environment and *gasp* someone elses engine. That said I'm gonna have some teething issues with trying to learn Unity and C# from scratch at the same time as doing the challenge.
So I followed some tutorials last night on youtube and this morning, and I have a tentative feel for how I might be arranging stuff in this drag and drop editor thingy. I still end up having to google how to do every little thing but I'm sure it will get faster.
I want to make a global array of map locations to put your towers in, so each location is either ground for walking, a tower of some type or some decoration. Instead of making all the graphics specifically for it, I thought I'd rip off some of the models from my jungle game. I haven't got anything resembling a tower yet, but I'm sure I can build something quick in blender.
The process of importing models from blender seems a bit clunky (I was hoping to be able to import a whole lot at once) but is just about doable, it won't seem to recognise the textures in a blend file so I have to set them up manually.
So I now have it creating a grid of prefabs, it should be easy to import some more prefabs, vary them according to some map generator. Come to think of it I should try playing a tower defence game for research, I don't really know how they work...
You'll catch onto to C# fast coming from C++. Looking forward to seeing your progress! Nice work!