Unity's Own: Unity Tutorial 03

This weeks tutorial guided us through coding the controls for the truck in our game so that the player can make the truck go forward or backwards, left or right. This was something that I couldn't figure out when making my game last year so having it explained so well step by step from the beginning really helped me to understand where I went wrong.

Screenshot of my Unity Truck Game 

These tutorials also have challenges and quizzes after each unit to test you on what you've learned. The challenges are games with bugs that you have to fix and the quizzes are just simple questions. This units challenge was to fix a plane that that couldn't be controlled and was moving in circles at a fast speed. 

Screenshot of Plan Challenge

I think that these challenges and quizzes really help to solidify the information you've learned over the course of the unit and there are hints available for you if you get stuck on the challenge.  

I'm looking forward to seeing what the other units have in store and what other things I can learn about making games in unity.

Reading 3: Doing your research

After I found my research questions it was time to start doing the research. This is the method I used when researching.

When researching there can be a lot of results for sources that don't really relate to what you're writing about and reading through all the results when not all of them are ones you need can waste a lot of time that you need to write. So when reading through your findings it best to use the three-pass method.

The first pass should be a quick scan of the source, read the title, the abstract, the conclusion and the introduction before reading the headings and sub headings. Look through any images or figures and skim the references.

Screenshot of title from here 

Screenshot of image from here

If after the first pass you think that this source could be useful to you then you can start your second pass. Engage and carefully read through the sources text, images and record relevant references for later reading.

The third and final pass is when you identify and challenge the assumptions of the authors, consider what you would do differently as the researcher and record ideas for further work. 

While you're doing the passes of your sources you should be highlighting and making note of quotations to use.

Feedback Thoughts: The Fear Of Mistakes

Image from Pixabay

Feedback is a tricky thing, when receiving it or giving it. People often don't like hearing feedback because it can be negative feedback and people don't like feeling like they've failed, which is why many people don't even try in the first place.

People are afraid of making mistakes, of being wrong and it holds so may people back from their true potential because they won't try. They see mistakes as a bad thing because that is what we're taught. But as this article Making Good Art explains and as Neil Gaiman says we should be making mistakes, we should be making many mistakes "because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things". Mistakes are how we learn, making a mistake allows you to look at the situation figure out what not to do in similar situations in the future or the figure out what went wrong and work to fix it for next time. Making mistakes is important.

But why is it we fear making mistakes so much? Most likely because we fear the rejection that might come with it. Rejection has been proven to cause actual pain even if it's only emotional, this is because it's been wired into are brains since people lived in tribes. It works as an early warning sign to warn us when we're in danger of be ostracised from the group which back then would have been a death sentence. This site Why Rejection Hurts So Much explains it much better and also talks about how to work past rejection.

All of this links in with Growth Mindset which I wrote about before and how we need to look forward to the challenge of a new task, including the mistakes, instead of worrying about the end result or the feedback. After all feedback is meant to help us understand what we did right or wrong and what to work on for next time.

Game Brainstorm: Four Ideas For Fun Games

After our first unity tutorials it's time to look into creating our very own game. Of course one can't create something without first coming up with ideas, that's where brainstorming comes in. I began by researching the different types of games and that lead me to this page that explained the different types and was very interesting.

While creating my own game sounds exciting I know that it will probably be harder than I think, so I have come up with for ideas for games that I have always found fun and yet may be easier to create than a game like Skyrim.

Image from Pixabay

Puzzle Game

Puzzle games have been around for years and the reason that they survive the test of time is because they're fun, simple and effective. The goal of most puzzle games is to make the players mind occupies itself with finding solutions to sometimes complex puzzles. However a puzzle doesn't have to be complex to be fun. 

There are many different types of puzzles, mechanical puzzles such as jigsaw puzzles or rubiks cubes, logic puzzles like sudoku or grid puzzles, and that's just to name a few. I found that this website explained all the different types of puzzles very well.  I would like to possibly create a puzzle game that starts off quite simple and works its way up to more complicated puzzles. 

The goal of the game would be to either escape somewhere, like an escape room game, to solve puzzles to collect clues or to solve puzzles to gain points. Like most puzzle games I would like to add a hint system so that the player never gets really stuck because the frustration of being stuck might lead them to not completing the game.

The drawback of such a game would be thinking up enough creative solutions to the puzzles especially for puzzles that I am not particularly good at, for instance sudoku.

Image from Flickr

Fighting Game

Fighting games are very popular in recent years in one form or another, Super Smash Bros, Mortal Kombat and plenty more games like them have the same simple and fun mechanic that everyone seems to enjoy. You pick a character form a menu of different customisable characters and then beat up an opponent or they beat up you. Playing with friends adds an extra layer of fun.

I would like to create a similar game, however the player would not face off against one other opponent, the player instead would face off against creatures. The character would start off with a flimsy weapon and slay monsters and other beast to gain coins they can then use to upgrade their weapon to face off against harder enemies.

Keeping the game interesting may be hard especially with how repetitive beating the same enemies over and over again can get, so coming up with a simple story for why the player must defeat these enemies could help with holding interest. The Legend of Zelda games or good example of what I'm talking about though they do have a lot more in the games than just defeating enemies. 

A simple story would be that your character lives in a land that is overrun with creatures that do harm to others and you are part of a group of people who fight back against these enemies so that the people of this land don't have to suffer anymore. This article that I found online goes more in depth into why people like fighting games and what makes a good fighting game.

Image from Flickr

Endless Running Game

Endless running games are all over the app stores of every phone, for example the popular temple run game, they're all quite similar in so far as you play as a character who is moving in a straight line usually away from something, avoiding obstacles and gaining points and sometimes brief power-ups.

The big difference in these games is the design. Each one of these games has its own story, characters, obstacles and power-ups. Some of them are simple 2D with few power-ups and obstacles and some are more complex with lots of animation and characters, both of them are equally as fun. These types of games, while simple, are effective in keeping people entertained.

For my game I would like to make it 2D and a side scroller with a simple character design and obstacles. I found good video tutorial on this type of game on youtube. I could use the skills I learned in illustrator to create my own simple designs for my character. In my game as you ran you would collect gems or coins in order to gain the most points.

Image from Wikipedia Commons

Platform Game

Platform games are similar to running games as there are tons of them out there and that there are ones with both simple and complex designs. However platform games are not endless.

These games tend to have levels with different layouts to each one and it is all about the jumping mechanic, unless the character is given a helping hand in the form of a rope or a boost then it is the players challenge to judge the jump just right so as to get their character to the next platform without the character falling. Many platforms also have enemies or obstacles in them that are there to make it more difficult for the player to complete a level.

Some platform games also double as rhythm games, for example geometry dash, where the player needs to jump to the beat of a song to complete the level.

My idea for a platform game would be a simple vertical platformer with the character jumping upwards from platform to platform. The theme would be space with the character jumping form star to star and sometimes catching a shooting star to move up more platforms. Possible enemy ideas could be aliens that attempt to knock the character off the platforms.

My First Game Design: Unity Tutorial 1

Image of Unity logo from here

This week we had our first look into designing our own games. I used three video tutorials made by Jimmy Vegas to learn how to do the basics of creating your game environment.

In the first video he started out with showing us briefly how to set up our new project and then taught us how to bring a range of 3D objects into a scenes such as cubes and spheres, and how to change the properties of those objects so that they could become pillars or so that one couldn't pass through the other in the scene using the collider. Briefly at the end of the video he showed us how to bring in your own terrain and then how to manipulate it by raising it into bumps like hills.

Image of Unity screenshot by me

In the second tutorial he went more in depth about the terrain and how to make it look the way you want. Jimmy shows you all the different types of terrain tools that can be used to create mountains or valleys by raising and lowering the terrain, he shows how to soften the edges of risen terrain or make it more jagged and finally he shows you how to add textures, like rock, dirt and grass, to your terrain.

The last video shows you how to add your character by basically dropping a camera into the environment that acts as the characters point of view. He also shows you how to add more detail to your environment like trees and grass. After putting the grass into the game you can change it in many ways, you can change the healthy and dry colour and how much it moves in the wind. In the later half of the video he introduces us to the scripting aspect of unity by showing us how to make a gem rotate.

These are all skills that will be essential to me when I begin to create my own game for my big project and I found that following along with these tutorials really helped me.

Opinions On Game Design

Image of game from Wikipedia

Recently I read about what makes a game and game design, there is no definitive definition for what a game is nor specific words for the different components of a game which of course makes it hard to talk about games without comparing them to other games that are already out there, as the article talked about.

Many people are trying the make words for the elements of games more common so as to make it easier to discuss games but this is not as easy as it seems. However the elements that make up a game are agreed upon, what makes a game is much less agreed upon. There are people who debate on whether things such as Rubik's cubes or Dungeons and Dragons are games, often because they have no obvious end goal.

I thought that this blog explained it very well.

Image of game design from here

The title game design encompasses many things as explained here, level design, content design and system design just to name a few but despite the common misconception it does not involve art, animation or programming. System design focuses on defining the rules of the game currently being made, how the game begins, what the players can do and how that affects them and the end goal of the game. This blog goes more in depth about iterations in and interesting way.

In order to do this the game designer must be an architect, to design blueprints for buildings in the game, lawyers, to define the rules of the game and artists. Game design can involve all these things and more. A key element to game design is iteration, iteration can help bring a game from  just playable to a likeable game, it brings the game from its original idea to the end result.

Games and game design is an interesting, diverse and complicated subject that will be satisfying to learn more about.