S2 Unity Tutorial 6

Animation 

The tutorial for week six is all on animation. Animation being a big part of a lot of games is a very useful thing to know how to do, but actually getting them to work is a pain. 

My first taste of animations was in last semester when I was trying to activate a walking animation in my RTS project. At first that was awkward but was pretty easy in the end as I was only using to animations. In the tutorial however is a bit more complex using a few different animations.

It was pretty daunting at first as besides the amount of animations being used another significant difference was the layout of the animator use layers for different animations while my previous one only had the one layer. It only got worse as I started to run into errors that Ii was causing in my code because after making the mistake it would take me a while to actually find where I had gone wrong. 

All in all one thing to take away from this tutorial is that animation is irritating and time consuming task that needs to be done were necessary. 

Screenshot of week 6 tutorial

S2 Unity tutorial 5

Back on Track

So after changing from the VR tutorials to the basic Unity tutorials I finally got back on track with where we are meant to be in the tutorials for this week. This weeks tutorials were really helpful as it had us creating a projectile that moves forward from its relative to the why the object is facing. 

The other great part of the tutorial that I found helpful was on how to create a "Unit" spawner that could spawn what ever assets you had put into the array. The great thing about the array is that you can seem to have as many assets held within it to spawn as you want. The best part of the method used for the spawning assets was the way it could be easily changed to be 100% automatic.

Screenshot  of Prototype 2 tutorial

S2 Unity tutorials 4

Unity tutorials 

So after hearing and seeing the "beginner" tutorials from Unity I decided to go back and start those in place of the VR tutorials. While the VR tutorials are interesting the beginner tutorials are far more useful as they go through basic game scripts. 

The main reason I changed the tutorials I was doing is because I decided to continue on with the game I started making in my last semester as my Multi Media Development project. One of the biggest problems I have when it comes to games development is the script mostly because when I first started the original tutorials I let a lot of the explaining of the scripts go over my head cause of how much other work I had to worry about. Having changed from doing the VR tutorials to the beginner tutorials I have fallen a little behind on the weekly tutorials but at the current pace I've been doing them I should be back on track soon enough. 

Tutorial 1 screenshot 

S2 Unity Tutorial 2 + 3

VR Unity tutorials 

Second semester starting up and a new Multi Media Dev assignment. This time we were given a chose between some of the more basic unity tutorials and some VR tutorials. The basic tutorials were recommended to those of us who couldn't quite get a grasp on Unity in the last semester, the basic tutorials are Unity's own tutorials on making a game. The VR tutorials were suggested for those of us who enjoyed doing Unity in our last semester. I decided to take up the challenge of the VR tutorials since I'm not one to shy from a challenge given that I had dove into the deep end of the game dev project with the RTS. My initial impression of doing the VR tutorial was that it was going to be incredibly difficult to wrap my head around but having started them I pleasantly surprised with the tutorials. For the most part Unity's VR tutorials are easy to follow and understand some confusion may be caused by a differing layout of assets, folders and item locations. 

Screen shot of Unity VR titorial

"Beta"

My "Beta"

So presentation is right around the corner and as I feared I was unable to make a complete game. But on the bright side what I do have seems to be work fine I haven't seen any bugs or glitches but knowing my look all the glitches well show for the presentation.

Screenshot of "Beta"

Unfortunately I am not where I would like to be I had a string of bad luck with my games development that really held me back. The biggest problem I have is, as expected, with the script. With an RTS game you select your units by left clicking for one, Shift left clicking of certain units and clicking and dragging a box for group selections, I can only manage to activate clicking and shift clicking or box selection, I can't seem to get these actions to work in unison with one another and have had to disable the box selection for my units.

Unity Free Tutorials

Making Progress

Through my endeavor to find Unity tutorials to help me with the scripting of my game I came across a channel that had a playlist of videos that really help kick start my progress after finally resolving the issue I had been having with my camera position. 

Th videos helped me to make my units selectable though the three  different methods commonly used in RTS games, that being click for a single unit, drag select for a large group and shift click specific units from a group. The tutorials also helped me set up markers to indicate what units are selected and which units aren't.

Screenshot of play test of game

Game Stories

Into the Woods: A Practical Guide to the Hero's Journey:

This article starts off by highlighting why the heroes journey is important and gives multiple examples of why the heroes journey is important. The article then proceeds to explain what the heroes journey is. The article summarizes the elements involved with a heroes journey and gives a list of these elements. The article then goes on to explain how the heroes journey can be used to build stories.

Screenshot of  "Into The Woods..."

What Every Game Developer Needs to Know about Story:

The second article was on the importance of story in games. The article states the games are not movies and are in turn their own form of story. The article goes over some common misconceptions about stories in games. the article also goes over why characters matter to the stories of games.

Screenshot of "...Needs to Know about Story"