"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"

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