Everyone at our household have always had aversion to violent computer games. When we speak of games, we mainly speak of immersive environments, educational games and, since Simon took his first steps in programming a few years ago (what? nearly 5 years ago?), game development. Most of the games the kids have played have been classics (like Add ‘Em Up or 2048), many of which Simon went on to recreate. And then, there came Run.
Its latest release, Run 3, is much more than an indie game. Though simplistic in design, it has a very strong storyline and well developed character personalities, the game sessions alternating with absurdly eloquent and profound “cutscenes” (short comic scenes). I actually think Neva’s English vocab and sense of humor reached a total new high thanks to reading and memorizing all those cut scenes.
Simon and Neva have been obsessed with all the three versions of Run that have come out so far. The story has served as an unfathomable source of inside jokes and deep philosophical discussions (as in why do people believe in conspiracy theories). Somehow I knew that when time is ripe, Simon would inevitable try to build a clone of the game. And that time came faster than I’d expected!
At first, Simon created a simple version of Run 1 in p5.JS:
Simon’s code: https://editor.p5js.org/simontiger/sketches/LmwJ2yVSt
Link to the original Run 1 (it’s not the original though, since the original was a Flash game): https://player03.com/run/1/beta/
And then there came his first real 3D project, written in C# in a real game engine he had fantasized about for ages: Unity!
My first project in Unity! You might have heard of a game called Run. It’s a game where you can run/jump around, but if you hit a wall the level rotates so that it becomes the floor. I wanted to learn Unity for a long time, so I wanted to try to make a simple version of the game as a means to learn it. It went well, until I tried to make the level-rotating mechanic. I tried every possible way to debug it, took me several days to mostly figure it out (still haven’t solved it completely).
Simon’s Run 2 clone assets on GitHub: https://github.com/simon-tiger/Run2Clone
Link to Run 2: [Run 2 is the only Run game which is not actually playable anymore due to Flash being dead]
By the way, should you be looking for a nice Unity tutorial, Simon absolutely adores Sebastian Lague’s Introduction to Game Development with Unity and C#
For clarity’s sake, Run is not made in Unity. The creator of Run Joseph Cloutier (nicknamed player_03) made his game in an engine he built himself (at least that’s what Simon has been able to deduce by searching the web as player_03 is quite a mysterious person).
One of the most famous and beautiful games that was made in Unity is another favorite of ours, Monument Valley.
Geeks out of the box 