Unity Course Update #2

Hello again!


I'm now ~35% of the way through my course, and I've finished another project! Here's Project Boost:

Fly your spaceship to the green platform

I built this game by following a tutorial, so the finished product feels pretty similar to the original. But the level design and some of the fine-tuning of the mechanics were my own decisions.

I learned about changing the FOV of the camera, using lights, the prefab hierarchy, using audio clips, materials, and a bunch of other stuff. Thought it's surface-level knowledge for now, I'm sure my knowledge will get deeper with time.

Some of the walls move

I'm still learning a lot about making very clear code that is self-contained and easy to read; I have especially learned to keep any particular method from doing too much.

Also, I can use version control now! I'm currently using Sourcetree, and I'm sure there's a way to make it jive with Github; I'll figure that out later I suppose. Here's a link to my Github repo for this project, if you'd like to check out the code. 

It's been really fun to commit changes and keep track over everything I did. I know a lot of people find that boring, but I like getting to summarize my work and get that tiny high from making progress.

Not to brag,  but I'm pretty good at the game

In total, it took my 10 days to make this project. With the knowledge I've gained and the hours of videos watched, I think I could probably produce something similar in half that time now. I might have mentioned in a previous post that I joined a game jam; it ends tomorrow, but this project fits the theme, so I thought I'd submit it, noting that I used a tutorial to make it. It's a beginner's jam, so I think that will be a welcome gesture.

In case you missed the link, you can play the game here.

Next up is a "rails shooter" game. That always makes me think of Pokemon Snap, a wonderful old game for the N64 about taking pictures (They're making a new one, by the way). I don't think this game will be anything like that, though!

Until next time,

Christian

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Unity Course Update

Image
 Hello! I'm about 20% of the way through the Unity course I'm working through right now, and I just finished a project called "Terminal Hacker." I basically just followed along with the tutorial for this one--I came up with the names of some Nintendo characters, but that's about all I contributed!  But I got a better feel for C# and how it's used in Unity, I used Visual Studio for the first time, and I played around with Unity's debug mode. C# seems similar enough to Java that most of my prior knowledge there is carrying over. I also learned about enums. In the past, I've used strings to store things like gamestate; in this project, we used an enum, and I really like that better. It makes it harder to accidentally use the wrong value (i.e., storing "gamestarted" in the string by accident when it should have been "gamestart"). I enjoyed this project, and it's been fun getting a little bit of peer review and seeing other people&#
Read more

Josiah and the Singin' Woods is finished!

Image
Huzzah! My first rhythm game and second major project using PICO-8 is finished! Since my last update, I've added a title screen, an ending and score screen, and a difficulty meter (the stars at the top right do something now!). I also made some tweaks based on the completely voluntary playtests that I totally didn't force my friends to do. Here's a 3-minute overview of the way I structured the code and some of the functionality as well: This game's inspiration came from many sources. I have always loved old American folk music, so when I found this song, Bury Me Beneath the Willow, it inspired the whole theme of this game! Here's the version that I ended up liking the most, if you'd like to give it a listen: I also really love Dance Dance Revolution , one of the greatest rhythm games of all time, and it's inspiration is pretty obvious in the project. Rhythm Heaven is a game for the Nintendo DS that helped inspire this project as well, though I've never
Read more