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"

Week 9 Progress

Progress so far

Up until I was had started to make a lot of progress on my project game. I had managed to gather up the assets I intended to use in the final version and I had managed to set up a prototyping file specifically for testing my assets and getting everything ready for final version. However I had hit something of a brick wall in my progress as I was unable to get my RTS camera positioned correctly and was thus unable to test my assets and code. This halted my progress as I didn't want to write out code for different functions of the game encase they didn't work and I was afraid that I would only make things worse if I tried to fix a problem that I couldn't test,

Progress going forward

Now that I have finally managed to fix my RTS camera and can now test scripts as I write them I can finally get back on track with my progress which I have fallen a week behind where I would like to be and need to heavily focus on getting as much done as quickly as possible to be able to meet the given deaaline with an at least semi completed game. 

Indiana Bones is ready for an adventure 

Review Week Comments and Feedback

Feedback 

This week we're doing a lot of reflecting on our work for our multimedia development module and since the beginning we have been getting feedback on our blogs through the comments and the occasional feedback on our project.

The best place to find a constant flow of feedback  has been the comments on all the different posts of my blog and it's great to see people have been enjoying reading my blog posts and a=have been very active in helping point things out or giving advice for my project and it has been a huge help in making progress in making my game.

Prototype Progress

I have been getting a lot of encouragement from my classmates as well as my lecturer in regards to making my game and getting around all the problems that have arose during the making of my game.

Prototyping First "Playable"

First Playable

Since my last post on my games prototype I have had a lot of ups and downs as expected and now with what progress I have made I am determined to go through with my plan for the RTS, although I'm not sure turning back is even an option at this point, and I'm going to get as much as I possibly can done which is going to be quite the feet for me to complete.

The Good:

On the brighter side I do have some good news in that my game prototype has gone from being just a few cubes to having most if not all the assets needed to for the games units and world. I have a number of different textures and enough units to make a more dynamic playing experience (if and when I get through the aforementioned problems) while I would have liked to have more units and structures what I do have will be plenty for an "Alpha" build if you will.

Screenshot show casing textures and assets

The Bad:

So the bad news. The bad news is that I have hit something of a wall as there are some rather minor albeit confusing complications. The biggest problem that I'm running into is with my camera for play testing the game. Even though the camera is very clearly positioned right over the units that I want it to be when I go into the game to test things out the camera snaps back to the origin point of the scene while staying at the same height that I placed it at meaning instead of the position being X: 481 Y: 60 Z: 442 it goes to X: 0 Y: 60 Z:0 this issue was something that I had gotten help to fix before and thought that it was fixed only to have it resurface again when I went to test the game again. The other issue that I have is more of a inconvenience than anything else is that one of the assets that I have for my game has no animations which are done with scripts instead.

Screenshot of my camera malfunction

The Ugly: 

While I feel I have all the necessary assets to build my game the problems I stated have more or less halted all progress that I can make as there isn't much that I can do until these problems are dealt with. 

Unity Free Tutorials

Free Unity Tutorials:

This week we weren't given Unity tutorials to do, instead we had to go and find some of our own to help us with our projects of making our first game (unless others have already made a game then it would be their first). Anyway back on track I found two Unity tutorials one of which helps me while the second would have the ability to help everyone trying to use animations. 

How to make RTS Camera Movement in Unity:

So as I stated in one of my previous posts I have decide to try my hand at making a Real Time Strategy game. These games have a some what unique camera angle as they are almost always in a top down format meaning that the camera is constantly looking down on the map the angle of this view can be change slightly with scrolling and panning but retain the top down aspect. These games have you directing units by clicking where they need to go or attack. this makes the cursor the controller for the game and I needed a way to create this in Unity and thanks one of my classmates who gave me a link to a video showing how to do this I was able to make my own, so thank you.

Import Mixamo Characters to Unity 2017:

The second tutorial I watched was on how to animate a character model which had been confusing me quite a lot since I downloaded an asset pack that came with animations. I  tried to simply drag and drop the animation file onto the model but it would work and after trying a few more times with varies methods I gave up and took a break from that, but after watching the tutorial I got my character models to go from T-posing to stand normally. I figure this tutorial may help anyone also struggling with animating models.

No more T-posing

Game Fun

Game Fun

This weeks readings are on "game fun" and the link I followed brought me to a site called gamasutra which is chalked full of different articles on gaming however it should be stated that the articles are out of date and the newest of which were made in 2014. 

Hack-Man: An interview with Watch Dogs' creative director

The first article I read was of an interview with the creative director of "Watchdogs" Johnathan Morin. The interview touches on his feels with the game and how he feels that it is the next step in the next generation of gaming. 

Video games and gun violence: A year after Sandy Hook

The second article that I read was on a meeting with the U.S Vice President to speak about gun violence after a mass shooting in Sandy Hook Elementary school. This event lead to the first time that the President had taken formal political steps to study any purported link between violent video games and real-life violence. Within hours of the tragedy, Fox News was pointing fingers at video games, along with the usual suspects like reality TV and Facebook and many other news networks followed suit. CBS News went on to say that the victims of the shooting apparently amounted to some kind of 'score.'

Prototyping

Game/Level Design

What's going wrong:

Starting with the negatives of my project, I'm trying to stick to the decision to make a RTS game and as much as I was expecting it to be an up hill battle to get it done it's proving harder than I had originally thought as I'm trying to find assets to us in the game but unfortunately that task is proving incredibly difficult, I have managed to find some good models to use but can't figure out how to turn the models into assets. another big problem I'm running into is find tutorials on how to make a RTS game while I found one series of tutorials it was just my luck that is wasn't on the same style I'm gunning for with mine.

What's going right: 

Well that's not hard to answer at all and the answer to this question is quiet simply put not much. Since I'm sort if only starting things off there still things that I haven't gotten around to doing or just haven't thought of yet all that does seem to be working well for me is the prototype of by world map which as of the moment is rather bare.

Screenshot of prototype game world

Games Decisions

Massively Multiplayer Online Games and Social Gaming: 

Lostgarden blog

This weeks reading is on the social aspect of gaming leaning into online gaming and social psychology.

The article starts off by listing off the problems revolving around an MMO or Massively Multiplayer Online game. The article rounds off the problems by pointing out were they stem from that being the key word of "Massively". This cause's problems with a games scale, pacing and level design. 

Social Groups:

Later on in the article it begins to touch on social groups and different aspects of society.  It begins by stating a brief explanation on what a social group is. 

Individuals in groups are connected to each other by social relationships.

Self-categorization perspective 

is when an individual looks at a person or group of people and mentally puts them into a category. This act is something I don't like and try to avoid doing myself because I hate being compared to other people good or bad as I am my own person and I am not like someone else I'm like myself "If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants."

 Social Cohesion Perspective 

Social cohesion goes hand in hand with categorization as it is the idea that we act according too shared social norms. My thoughts on social cohesion is more or less the same as social categorization as I feel that social norms lead to stress in some children and teenagers that may be afraid of stepping outside of what society deems normal.