Unity Tutorial 5

Last week in our unity tutorials we made a kind of space invader-esque game using pizza and farm animals, which is great but this week we're looking to improve upon that. So lesson 2.4 focuses on making a couple of improvements, first of all we make the animals spawn completely randomly instead of on command to make the game somewhat challenging. We do this by writing a function in the code to mark the spawn range as random before we throw in some additional code so they spawn on a timer.

Next we needed to fix the problem of projectiles flying through the animals when they connect with eachother. Using colliders and checking the "Is Trigger" button we created an interaction between the animals and the projectiles, in the next step we added code to turn that interaction into the deletion of the animal. Finally we use code to trigger a pop-up game over screen should an animal make it past the player, and with that our space invader/farm animal game is functional.

We also had bit of  challenger to do for this weeks tutorials, this was pretty much to make with the same concept as the one we've been working on, but with a different arrangement, this mainly consisted of reusing what we had just learned but it was cool to see how we can make different looking games using the same mechanics.

"Fetch Game"

Source Unity

Unity Tutorial 4

So for this Unity tutorial we took a look at a couple of different things, in the first tutorial (2.1) we looked at some basic movement functions as well as how to prohibit the player from moving to a certain area, such as the end of the map. This is done with something called an "if" factor, that for example tells the game to move a character to the right "if" they step too far to the left. I found this pretty cool since this kind of concept is used all the times in games, so learning about it was pretty interesting.

In tutorial (2.2) we looked at how to launch projectiles, in this case food, at animals. This is done by writing script that makes the object go forwards, by using prefabs we can make that motion occur whenever the player presses a certain button, in this case the spacebar, a pretty cool mechanic with plenty of uses. We also looked at how to create boundaries on the edge of the map, which deletes/removes any objects that go past them and leave the map.

In the final tutorial (2.3) we pretty much spawned animals by pressing a button and made them walk around. All of this was done with random values so the animals spawned randomly at different points in the map. This was done similarly to what we did in the previous tutorial. We also messed with the camera a bit and flipped between isometric view and perspective view. When complete the final version is pretty much space invaders but you have random animals trying to kill you, unique stuff.

Source Unity

Unity Free Tutorials

Unity Free Tutorials

Back at it again with yet another unity tutorial, this week were yet again allowed to go off and pick a tutorial of our choice that best relates to our game. Previous tutorials I've picked included tutorials regarding how to create a useable health bar and a fire with particle effects. This week I'll be using a tutorial by the one and only Jimmy Vegas about how to create moveable platforms within a game, the reason for this being that as I've progressed on making my game I've realised my concept was actually fairly difficult to do, especially when you're awful at Unity. So the concept of my game has slightly deviated to a a kind of platform adventure game, as such this tutorial will be really useful. Moveable platforms have always been a staple of platform games and to my knowledge I don't think a lot of other people are using them in their games, not that it makes a difference.

The tutorial itself is pretty straightforward, you just need to create the platform then move it while recording to make the animation. Then you just add some script to make it interactable with the player. Not the most advanced feature, but definitely one that can add a little something to my game.

(Le Jimmy Vegas tutorial)

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Games Testing

This week as part of our readings we were given material to read regarding game testing as well as how to give constructive criticism, obviously these two things go hand and hand. The first link discussed the aforementioned constructive criticism, it talked about how important it is to give unbiased and valid feedback when criticising a game, this makes sure that the criticism is as valuable as possible. Another point made by the post is to ensure that the feedback is clear, understandable and relevant, this insures that the receiver of the feedback fully understands it and can use it to improve on their game.

The second link we were given talked about game testing, one interesting thing of note that I found in the reading was how it stated that game testing from a gamer is just as valuable as game testing from a fellow developer. While developers would closely examine your game and look for flaws within it a gamer will instead give you first hand feedback. The gamer can also recount to you how your target audience would feel, as you are indeed trying to sell to gamers, not game developers.

(A desk of developers reviewing a game)

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Unity Free Tutorials

Hola, this week for our unity tutorials we were allowed to go off and select our own tutorial to take a look at. Last time we were allowed to this I selected a tutorial that showed me how to create a usable health bar within my game, this week I've chosen a tutorial that talks about how to add fire and smoke into your game. The tutorial itself was pretty straight forward, walking us through the process step by step, from creating the fire itself to making a particle effect to imitate smoke.

The reason I chose this tutorial was simply because it was relevant in my game. In one of the games 5 levels the theme of the world is the element fire, therefore learning how to create fire and smoke in unity is of great use to me. I also think it would be interesting to mess around the this mechanic and try out a mixture of colours like purple and pink and if it looks as good as I think it will i'll find a way to incorporate it into the game, since a big part of my game is for it to be aesthetically appealing.

(Thumbnail of the tutorial I watched)

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Week 9 Progress

So far I'm happy with the progress I've made in this module. My weekly routine is pretty solid, it mainly includes me doing the work on the day its due and then spending a whole day catching up whenever I fall behind, but so far I've gotten the vast majority of my work done. Out of all the assignments I probably enjoy the unity labs the most despite popular opinion, they feel a lot more useful and relevant than the readings or especially the blog comments. Plus, even if we're stuck on a specific part of a unity tutorial we can leave it till later as long as we've spent an allotted amount of time on the work, this is really useful for me because it allows to me to be more flexible with my work schedule and revisit the complication at a later date. I haven't used any of the extra credit options yet but I think I will work through some of them soon, as soon as I figure out how to check my current grade and see if the extra credit work will be necessary, but I do suspect that I'll be using plenty of them by the end of the module.

In terms of looking forward to the future I think I'll be more or less sticking to the same routine, I am cautious of one or two potential pitfalls however, these include running into technical problems with my unity game and also not having enough of the blog posts done to get a good grade. otherwise, everything is going well.

(Doge)

Source: Wikipedia

Week 9 Reading and Writing

Overall the reading and writing assignments that we've been given for this module are going pretty well. Ive been able to get the vast majority of them done and they're a lot more straight forward then other work we do for this module. My favourite reading by far has been the reading that we've done regarding the elements that make a good game (objectives, rules, themes etc.) and how they effect the aforementioned game, mainly because it's an aspect of games that i've never thought about and when you take a good look at it it seems trivial. One example that caught my interest was that the theme can make the rules of the game a lot more clear, in chess if a piece is called a knight it gives no indication that it moves in a L shape, however in a game like Civ 5 if a farmer is called a farmer, its pretty clear that this dude farms.

In relation to the game i'm creating the readings haven't been helping much, mainly just because they're irrelevant to my game since the majority of the mechanics we discussed aren't applicable to said game. However, I have learned a new way to approach games that i'll very likely adopt in the future. Overall i'm happy with the progress i've made on my game so far, i'm still a little bit behind on my 1st playable/alpha but I still think i've done well up to this point. My biggest accomplishment has probably been uploading every post on time for the first 5/6 weeks since i'm now having to neglect doing some posts in favour of working on other modules, those first 5/6 weeks though probably should of gotten me a big percentage of my grade.

(Regarding my favourite image so far i'd probably go with this one. Theres very little images in contention for this coveted award so this one takes it. Reason being is that its from a reading I did that talked about how Diablo 2 is considered a MMO game despite hosting a maximum of 8 people. Just something that caught my interest and something to relates to the fundamentals of what makes a game a certain type of game.)

In terms of looking forward to the future in this module? I'd probably say that i'm interested in how my game will turn out and I think it'll be a lot of fun to finish. I'm still pretty rookie with unity but I think a few more Jimmy Vegas videos should solve that. Otherwise I don't think I have any worries going into the final stages of the module.