Attempts at Unity
- Emma
- Aug 29, 2020
- 3 min read
Unity is an amazing software which allows you to make games and animations from simple designs to high resolution games. Here are some of the things you can do with Unity:
When we were introduced to Unity, I won’t lie, I was intimidated. I have never attempted at making a game, and I have also never been exposed to much coding let alone how to write it ourselves.
The amount of possibilities and intricate layout is not easy for beginners. So I stayed away from exploring Unity for a couple of weeks. However I took to Youtube recently to find some beginner friendly tutorials to help me familiarize myself with the basics of the software.
I followed Youtuber Brackeys’ miniseries, How to make a Video Game in Unity which are 10 episodes outlining making and coding a basic game in Unity. It was easy and clear to follow helping me familiarize the layout of Unity such as the animations panel and the Assets panel, and of course make a playable game!
You can find his Youtube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYbK_tjZ2OrIZFBvU6CCMiA
Movement
The first thing we created was a ground platform and player. The ground was given a physics material so that it is slippery and the player slides along it. I coded using C# language and the first thing to do was to make the player be able to move. This was done by adding a forward force to the player, then sideways force when the ‘a’ and ‘d’ keys are pressed allowing the user to control the sideways movement of the player. The next thing to do was to make the camera follow the player, this is done by locking the position of the camera to the position of the player.
Game Layout
I created obstacles from cubes which the player will have to dodge and laid them out in different ways to make the game interesting.
Here is my first play through!
Game Over!
I had to code the game so that when the player hits an obstacle it stops moving. It also has to create an ‘end trigger’ so that the game restarts after colliding or falling off the edge. There is a 1 sec delay before you restart to give the user time to prepare.
For some reason when I recorded these GIFs, when the level is restarted the game is upside down, I'm not sure why it did this but I assure you it doesn't actually flip upside down when you restart!
Level Complete
If the player made it through all of the obstacles then the level is complete and the next level loads. An important part of User Experience added is a text that shows you've completed a level. I created an animation which fades in showing a text saying "level complete" and then transitions to the next level. I also added a score which recounts the players moving position in whole numbers.
An aspect of UI is adding fog in the background so that you can’t see all the objects in the level at once. This makes the level more fun as you can't see the whole layout, it makes it visually interesting as well.
Overall I am very proud of myself and feel a lot more familiar with Unity. I think Unity is amazing and holds so many possibilities. I give credit to Brackeys for teaching me how to make this foundational game and also the basics of coding with the C# language. I want to create more levels for this game and also create more exciting obstacles and potentially add graphic backgrounds. I am still not familiar with coding by myself and I had to follow closely along with the tutorials, however my understanding of C# has improved greatly and I can at least understand why I wrote what I wrote and how it affects the game.
References
Unity. (2020, January 29). Unity 2019.3 is now available! [Video]. Youtube.
Brackeys. (2017). How to make a Video Game in Unity. Episodes 01-10. [Video]. Youtube.
Comments