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.'