Game Dev - Post 1

I had my initial game dev mentorship meeting with my mentor, Jason. We decided that my goal for the next six months is to have one fully-functioning and somewhat complex game by the end of the mentorship. This game would showcase the learning that I plan to do with game design, character modeling, sound design, and anything else that I can get my hands on. Although I am much more experienced in JavaScript and more web-focused development, I chose to use Unity (C#) as my game development platform. I think that this will be a better platform for this mentorship as Jason is very experienced in Unity. Unity will also allow me to expand my programming skills into a different programming language. I decided to start with the tower defense tutorial, but I think that may still be a bit too advanced from the “understanding Unity” side of things to start with.

I finished the beginner tutorial that I had started prior to my first meeting. The tutorial that I followed can be found here. The concept of a game is a player-controlled cube that is moving along a plane. You have to dodge obstacles on the plane and reach the “end” of the level ( a predetermined distance away from the start point) to win. This tutorial was a great introduction to Unity, and I learned about a lot of fundamental concepts that I now have an opportunity to explore further. These concepts include creating and controlling an object, basic 3D physics and collision detection, controlling a games start and end state, and a variety of other topics that I’m sure I missed.

Animation is an interesting aspect to Unity that I hadn’t even considered prior to making this game. Creating a “start” and “end” screen, as well as transitional screens for levels was a fun process to learn about, and the animation that you can add to them was quite interesting. I thought it was cool that you could just drag and drop fonts into Unity and have them available for your text displays. The scripting involved in most aspects of creating a game is still taking some getting used to. Declaring variables in your scripts, and then assigning those variables to different assets in your project is something that I have a hard time remembering to do.

I am hoping to improve upon this game to study the concepts that I’ve learned more, as well as to make the game “my own” a bit. Some of the current ideas that I have include:

• experimenting with different shapes for obstacles, including “ramps” to vault over square obstacles.
• giving the player the ability to “hop” using the spacebar
• changing the game to a more infinite style, where your final score is the distance that you achieve
• adding areas that could serve as speed boosters or speed reducers

This first game has been a great experience and I’m excited to try out other themes!