Transdimensional Adventures

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...

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 ...

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...