I've really been enjoying writing shaders lately, both in authoring environments such as Maya and Substance Painter, as well as optimized versions for mobile using Unity and ShaderLab
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Looking to build a 2D Platformer in Unity? I recommend you check out Weekend Code Project: Build A 2D Platformer In Unity by Jesse Freeman.
This book is a great resource to get started with if you are new to game development in Unity. It does a great job of teaching you how to build the various parts to a 2D platformer game step by step. It outlines what the current step is about, then shows the necessary code (in C#), and after that explains what the code is doing in the game. Super easy to follow!
Today I tried to create a section of Terrain in Unity using a Digital Elevation Model. I downloaded the DEM file from GeoGratis and converted it to a GeoTiff file using an open source application called QGIS. Once I had this GeoTiff, I was able to use this to create a mesh using the height information from the image. It turned out ok, but it is quite a dense mesh and probably is not the best way to create terrain in Unity. The built in Terrain tools in Unity are great, but I am curious to see what other ways of implementing terrain there are.
I had a little bit of time this morning to try out some more stuff with the navigation meshes in Unity and was really blown away at how easy it is to work with them. As you can see in this screen shot I just took my little zombie cubes and player object and placed them on a Unity terrain that I sculpted really quickly. I baked a navigation mesh for the terrain with a click of a button and boom! As with most tasks in Unity...it just works.
I decided to play around with navigation meshes in Unity this weekend to learn a little more about how they work. So far I'm just creating a very simple test with this little test environment, a player, a goal, some obstacles, and some zombie cubes that want to rip the polygons right off the players mesh!!! It was really simple to hook everything up and get it running. So I decided to grab the joystick controls from the Unity Standard Assets (Mobile) package and build this test for mobile. Tried it out on my Kobo Arc and it all seems to work great! I haven't done any profiling, but it seems to be running just fine. My next test will be with a mesh that is not flat. I will try out some terrain type meshes and see how Unity's navigation meshes work.
No I'm not making a Minecraft clone in Blender, however I am using this little cube in Unity to try programming some Minecraft-like features in Unity. Wish me luck.