Transdimensional Adventures

[Side note: I forgot to do the thursday Unity tutorial blog, I'll do it Soon ™ aaaa I'm so behind ] 🅱eta coming right up. Sike, I'm still behind. This time I learned a bit about enemy line of sight using raycasting and the related C# code. It was VERY INSTERESTING  (it was not). (menu screen!) I might improve on the menu screen, however I already think it's absolute state of the art, and even looks better than the modern Call of Duty's or Need for Speed's. I'm just that good at designing menu screens. The spelling is an aesthetic choice. So for the scoring system I found a tutorial which makes things very easy for me! The way it works is it gives the player points depending on how long the player survives.  I'll still need to add the ability for the player to collect in game objects. The game ends when the player is shot by an enemy spaceship (still a red cylinder for now, probably need to change it).

This week's reading teaches us the importance of game testing. The point of this is to find and squish as many bugs as possible before the game releases as well as ensuring the game is fun and balanced. Firstly, you want to try out an early prototype and make sure all the numbers are correct (things like player abilities, amount of health, damage, money, experience points, etc). ( image source ) Next, we start debugging. This aims to get rid of as many glitches, loopholes and stalemates as possible. One can of course solo test, and that may be enough for some games. However, for many other games this will be inadequate. Most, if not all multiplayer games need to be tested with multiple players, sometimes more than the design team has (see: MMO's like World of Warcraft). In this case, we turn to the QA team and open beta testers. These testers can be anyone from friends, family, to people who signed up for a beta on your website. After reading all of the mater

This week in Unity I added raycasting to my spaceship's weapons, instantiating explosions and enemy movement. Raycasting is basically the game checking if the player hits something with their weapons. I followed a tutorial and added a script to do just that. (source: own screenshot) As you can see, each laser has a separate script so they don't all have to hit or miss at the same time. It took a bit of messing around with the code but I got it eventually. Next I added instantiated explosions. This basically adds a particle "fire" effect to an object when it's shot. (source: own screenshot) As you can see, it's pretty basic at the moment, but as the guy in the video said, "once we add some proper particles to it, it's gonna look pretty cool" Next up, we created a script for the enemy movement. This one was a bit of a pain in the ass, because it just kept giving me compile errors and I couldn't figure out what's wro

The first reading for this week is called   Into the Woods: A Practical Guide to the Hero's Journey   This article talks about the "Hero's Journey". It's a concept in mythology and storytelling which is basically a template for most stories. ( image source , public domain) I'll be honest, I don't think the author did a good job explaining what "the myth" is in the first part of the article, and so I had to dig around a bit. It turns out "the myth" is just a story. The story doesn't need to have all the components listed above, and they don't necessarily have to be in the given order. The  wikipedia article for the hero's journey   explains what it is quite well and gives several examples for each point. The second article is called  What Every Game Developer Needs to Know about Story . This article again talks about the storylines in videogames. Side note: these articles are old, the author refers to the Xbox 360

Everything's just going awfully. Now that that's out of the way, what is going well? I added a cool looking trail to my spaceship, which turns on when I accelerate and turns off when I let off. (own screenshots, Unity3D) There it is. That's several days of work. I think C# just isn't my thing. I also added smooth camera! Rather than just dragging the "Main Camera" object under the spaceship and calling it a day, I had to spend several hours programming and whacking out code to make the camera "delay" in movement when the player accelerates or turns. Having finished that I moved onto firing lasers. Finally something interesting! So far this is what I have (own screenshot, Unity3D) For now the lasers just kinda blink every half second, but I swear to god I will make it do things! Would I call this an alpha? ...no but it's still more finished than whatever Bethesda puts out I'll be honest, I despise C# wit

This is the one I won't like As I've mentioned in yesterday's blog post, the past two months have been very hectic. Let's review my blog posts, shall we? Week 1 - Traffic Lights - the logic behind it World of Warcraft - my favourite game In the first week we broke down how it looks like, logically and step by step, when cars drive through traffic lights. We also talked about our favourite games which I think was cool. Mine is World of Warcraft; it's an MMORPG where you create a character and fight stuff. I've played it for over ten years (!). Week 2 - We had five blog posts this week (or at least that's how many I have done).  Introduction - everyone wrote a bit about themselves This week we also talked about the growth mindset which basically means the best way to learn new stuff and learn more is to step out of your comfort zone. Week 3 - This week we talked more about game design and did our first Unity tutorial. I liked this Unity tutorial

So overall, I think the idea of giving feedback in the form of comments on classmate's blogs is a really good idea. When we do that, we get feedback from the point of view of several people. I think this can be helpful because this could potentially give a person several (10 maybe even 15) ways to improve their stuff.  Personally, I find constructive, negative comments the most useful because they show me ways in which I can improve. I got several regarding my games and ideas for it. Thanks to them, I improved my controls system and had several ideas for smaller parts of the game and code. In my introduction post, I mentioned I have a dog and included a photo (here it is) ...and multiple people have commented on it, saying how cute she is! It might not be very constructive but people saying my dog is adorable is always nice to hear :) Here are some of the comments people left: "I didn't know you had a dog, she's lovely, will you ask her to murd

What a hefty two months this has been! In these short nine weeks I've learned a multitude of skills and facts, both about the process of designing and developing a game as well as about my classmates from college, since they're all writing their own blogs, and we often look at each others' blogs. My favourite reading was from week 7,  developing a princess saving app . I liked it because we took a deep dive "under the hood" of a simple app, a complex app and a videogame (which is an app too, really).  Also I liked this and wanted to share: (image taken from  week 7 reading PDF ) Overall, I would say I'm finding the game development part quite challenging because I set out to create a game that has a unique system, where you fly a spaceship rather than control a single character in an environment on terrain. I decided this at the start because we were shown  this video   which talks about the growth mindset. To me, creating a game like that would&

This time I'm doing a Wikipedia trail starting at EVE Online .  EVE Online is an MMO space simulation game which is renowned for the freedom it gives. According to the wikipedia page, the players "engage in unscripted economic competition, warfare, and political schemes with other players". I played EVE for a while but I found it too complicated and gave up on it. At the moment, the game stands at around half a million subscribers  From there I went to  Wind Commander   which is a space simulation game from 1990. This was one of the first, if not the first space simulation game. It first released on MS-DOS initially, and many more platforms after that.  By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51354770 As you can see, Wing Commander was quite advanced for its time, when most games were as simple as Mario Brothers. Following that, I clicked on  science fiction , which is quite a broad subject, it is "a genre of

For this week's tech task, I've changed my theme on blogger!  It was a bit dull before (almost no colour at all, and no background images or anything). So now I've made things look cooler. I changed the colour and picked a random background image from the ones I was given. I like how it looks now

Source: own image Would I call this playable? Yes Would I call it fun? No There's more coding to this than I previously thought there would be. So far I have made a spaceship from four stretched cubes and made it move around and rotate with W A S D. I also made a simple model for an asteroid and added scripts to make them a random scale and make them rotate in a random direction. Then I repeated them in a cube grid of 10 x 10 x 10 pattern so they make a huge cube. I still need to add offsets to the asteroids to their locations are less "regular" and it doesn't look like a massive cube.

For this week's Unity task, we decided ourselves which tutorials we're gonna follow and shared them with each other on  wakelet . Because I'm making a space themed game, I found a really good series on YouTube (and in fact the only one) that goes into great detail on the mechanics behind a spaceship flying game by YouTube user BurgZerg Arcade. Link to the playlist here The first video shows us how to make a (very) basic space ship, and I mean very basic. Simple Unity spaceship This is our spaceship. It consists of a whole four cubes and zero textures and we made it right here, in Unity. It'll do for our current purposes though. Next, we made it move forward and backward using the W and S keys respectively by adding a simple C# script. The next video talks about how we can rotate the ship around the 3 axes; roll, pitch and yaw Three axes of flight rotation (screenshot from BurgZerg's video) Again, all we do is add a pretty simple C# script

For this Wikipedia trail I have decided to step it up a notch and play the Wikipedia Hitler game, where you pick a random article (not random in my case) and try to get to Hitler in as little clicks as possible. I started with  the wikipedia page for Unity  and decided to go from there. I learned a bit about Unity, for example, did you know that Unity is compatible with pretty much any platform? PC, Mac, consoles, VR headsets, Unity's got it all! I think that's pretty cool because you can just make your game once, rather than having to change parts of code for different systems and having to play around with that. Next I went to  C#  and I understood basically none of it (hint: if you switch the language in the link to "simple", it gives you the article in simpler words, so instead of en.wikipedia.com, you put in simple.wikipedia.com). It was actually designed by Microsoft ! So that was my next stop. Microsoft's page has an image of Buzz Aldrin using their Ho

For this week's tech task I have created a meme Yes, a meme. I made this atrocity. Comic Sans MS italics, with a drop shadow just to spite all of you seeing this. I love you too :) It is 5:36am and I am very tired. Goodnight To make it, I used cheezburger and picked an image out of the list in the builder So that's all well and good but it feels a bit 2008-ish. Outdated, if you will. Let's modernise it a bit. Today's kids love deep fried memes, emojis and cartoons. So I wanted to see how far I could go. It's fantastic and I love it.

Where do I even begin? Firstly, I'm having a bit of trouble with Unity3D. I've had no big issues with it per se, but many annoying quirks which make it hard to work with. One of them is that every version of Unity looks slightly different. Different enough to make following tutorials for older versions a huge pain in the neck. Why do they gotta keep changing stuff? Secondly, I may have gone way overboard with the ideas for my game in the GDD, which I attribute to the copious amounts of cannabis consumed by me that night. In hindsight, that was an awful idea, but here we are now I guess. I think the best way to salvage my game is to make it in four degrees of freedom, put everything on a flat plane and give it zero friction to simulate zero-g. Let's do that then, shall we? So here's Level 1 of my game.  The player spawns in and immediately witnesses a huge explosion (purple hexagon). A space station is blown up. To the right there's the two major fac

This week, in Unity, I learned about skyboxes, pickable objects,  A skybox is basically what the sky looks like and how it lights up the scene. They are very important because they can really set the mood in the game. We can change the intensity of the directional light or turn it off completely. Wind zones make trees and grass rustling in the rush, though we first had to change some settings with the grass to make it work. Next, we learned how to add an object (an axe in this case) into the game, and then how to allow the player to pick it up in the game world.To do that we used a collider, which is similar to a hitbox. We added a script which prompts the user to press a button to pick the object up. We also added a simple script to make the screen fade in from black when the player starts the game. Lastly, we learned how to make the screen fade out and we also added extra 3D objects to our environment, like a house and change its properties.  I'm looking forward to devel

In this week's reading (I actually read the right one ) we learn about the psychological process behind a player's reasoning for their actions in-game.  We learn about learning curves in apps and games and how a simple app's learning curve compares to a complex one. In short, the simple app will have less features but will also be easier to use (an example could be MS Paint), whereas a more complex app will have a steeper learning curve but more features (like Adobe Photoshop ).  A game's learning curve steadily increases in bumps to give the player the best satisfaction. They learn to play the game better, upgrade their items, and along with that the difficulty steadily increases. We also learned about the STARS atom (Skills, Tools & Actions, Rules, Stimulus). 1. Skills What is the player able to do? 2. Tools & Action What does the player actually do? 3. Rules What happens in the game? How does the game react to the player's actions? 4. St

The first thing we created is more UI objects. The first one was text that shows what button we need to hit. We can move what the looks like (fonts, alignments, colour, etc), and where it is on the screen. We also added a subtitle to say what the hotkey does, in this case, it picks up a gem. Another thing we made was a custom crosshair, and then added it to the UI. Then we added a script to pick up the gem and play a sound when we do so. The second video talks about animation. We also added more objects (like the fence) into the game 3D environment, and made it solid. Another thing we did was we gave the player a weapon and created a simple attack animation. In the last video we learned about layering which fixed the issue of the axe going underground when the player looked down and we also added a script to play a "whoosh" sound whenever the axe was swung. There was several different ways to do it, each slightly different in code and in function. T

Note:  After writing up everything I have so far in a word document, I found out about tool that's much better called  dundoc . I will transfer all my information to that later. For now let's see what ideas I have for my game. Link to PDF of my (WIP) game design document In my GDD, I described what the game will be like, how it will play, what features will it have. (image source) It is a semi-open world (there will be separate star systems) casual space flight and combat simulator role-playing game (hefty name I know). It will involve dog fighting, some politics, and lots of friends and enemies. There will be an AI that tags along with the player. The HUD will look like the ship's console and the player will be able to use it by clicking it or pressing hotkeys. Several different ship and weapon types that progressively improve. I really look forward to developing the game.

This week's reading walks us through many important points we have to consider while developing a game. While it does talk about board and card games, a lot of these rules will also apply to video games. The first point that is brought up is "Components"  of the game. This can mean many things, for example cards, dice, or even Monopoly money and property cards. We are taught to be mindful of colour-blind players and to keep components of the same type looking similar. So in videogames this could mean to have enemies' colour coded or  look similar to each other. This shows an easy way to add "colourblind mode" to games The second point talks about "The Box" of the game. We learn about the do's and don'ts of game packaging. One important thing to keep in mind is to make the title of the game big on the side of the box so potential buyers can see what it is easily. This is a box art database, we could pick some good ones?

Genre:  Space flight simulation, science fiction, role playing game Gameplay:  The game takes place in a fictional present time, where the space race never ended and the USA (now the USSF, United States Space Federation) and the Soviet Union (now the SGE, Soviet Galactic Empire) expanded their reach throughout the galaxy, with constant show-off "contests" without a direct conflict (an extended cold war?). The governments became more and more totalitarian, until a rebellion broke out and the ILF (Insurgent Liberation Force) was created from rebels from both factions. Needless to say, the three factions don't like each other very much and control their own zones.  The player will have different interactions depending on their character/ship's stats (like in RPG's) The gameplay consists of the player working their way across the galaxy to its centre, through various star systems (some hostile, some not), with the help of different types of space ships, weapo

Heyo people, I'm back to do some Unity3D. Let's make something basic, like a clock. Firstly, we need to create a cylinder and make it wide and narrow. This is the face of the clock. We then place down 12 cuboids to serve as hour indicators. Spread them every 30 degrees and you're done. Lastly we create three more cuboids to be used as hour, minute and second hands.  The red one is the second hand and the two shorter ones are for minutes and hours Next, it's time to make it work! Using Microsoft Visual Studio, we create a C# script. We were shown many different ways to do it. In short, we told the second hand to make a full 360 degree rotation, around a point (XYZ) in sixty seconds. Same with the minute and hour hands. We were also shown how to make the second hand "tick" every second and also how to make the hand glide smoothly over its course. Here's a functioning clock. I think it's pretty cool!

What makes up a game? To answer that we have to look at existing games and what qualities/content they have. This is a list given to us by our lecturer: Players Objectives Rules Resource management Game state Information Sequencing Player interaction Theme Let's break it down; Players: how many players are there?  Do they play together or against each other?  Do they interact with each other at all? Are they alone or in a team? Objectives: What's the point of the game? To create/destroy something? To control/collect something? To race against others? (or time) Minecraft is a game, with seemingly no goal and expects the player to imagine their own objectives Rules: What's allowed? What's not allowed? What does one have to do to win? To lose? To draw? Does a player lose progress or get kicked out when they cheat? Resources: What's available to the player that's beneficial to them? What can they