Here we are again with the daily check-in, featuring your friendly-neighborhood team lead! This week in particular served as a continuation of last week, with the creation of a few more sprites and the process of implementing them directly into the Unity engine. This not only provided a few more assets for the final product but helped begin the process of a full team transfer onto a shared file, which will be my focus for this week as well. I also feel that this week was a little slower in comparison, at least in terms of making individual assets. The reason this is the case, however, is because I spent an extra amount of time helping my teammates with various issues, as well as spending more time as the team lead rather than the 2D artists, which is going to happen every once in a while. Regardless, I believe that I am making good progress in both areas. The plan for this week is as follows: Monday: Move entire team onto shared Unity file Tuesday: Continue animation and imports into Unity engine Wednesday: Further animation work Thursday: Implementation of animated sprites with respective player and enemy scripts Friday: Addition of whiteboxing for 3D environment.
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After completing the pre-production phase of the parkour level, I moved into the editor to model out and create the entire level. This process came with a number of ups and downs, all of which will be explained in this particular post. As you can probably tell, I spent a fair amount of time modeling this castle level, so much so that it is the only one I was able to finish out of the two I planned. I was fortunate enough to find a castle building asset pack on the Unity Store, practically giving me a giant stone LEGO set to work with. I made use of this and the ProBuilder tool to make the castle my own, complete with hallways and balconies for the player to run along. In terms of modeling, I'm extremely pleased with how it turned out, even more than I expected. Sadly, this is about where the positives start to end. While I was glad with the overall appearance, functionality took a backseat for reasons I cannot explain, mainly the fact that random surfaces are not solid and can be easily walked through. The reason I find this irritating is because I set each and every object with a modifier that makes them solid to walk on. So why don't they all work? My honest answer is this: I just don't know. I was running low on time to work this out in the first place, so I fully plan to work out the bugs after this school quarter ends, and my schoolwork enters a brief reset period as the new quarter begins. This project has yielded many accomplishments and irritations, and I plan to take advantage of each and every on when I find the time. I will finish this level in time for the PBMs.
Now this project took a good amount of time to make, which is both a positive and negative thing in this scenario. I'll start with the negative: This was an extremely stressful project at parts. That concludes the list of negatives. As for the positives, I'm very glad with the way that this turned out in the end, as it achieved a level of detail that I didn't even know I was capable of creating. The variation in terrain, the spread of structures, and different ways that I made use of other students components, I just feel the effort was worth it in the end. And I'm glad I ended with this rather than a rushed product. To kick off the design debrief, I'm going to quickly talk about the buildings that I "populated" the island with. Aside from one, I stuck very close to the original design of the buildings themselves, only making slight adjustments here and there whenever there were issues with importing or resizing the pieces. The main difference was in the Mountaintop Abode, which I gave a derelict appearance by placing certain pieces of the house in awkward positions, almost as if they had been ripped off by some kind of storm. These same buildings were placed specifically in areas with different geological characteristics, meaning that the process of traveling to them leads the player through new environments and encounters. That being said, the geography itself does not resemble that of a typical island, which is entirely the point, as the "imaginary lore" behind the island is that it is completely unmapped, and often difficult to reach in the first place. This atmosphere makes it easy to fill the land itself with as many mysterious things as humanly possible. Outside of this general criteria, I stuck to making a generally mountainous terrain, with the only areas actually considered "mountains" being especially tall and rocky. I also made sure to take advantage of the ability to generate forests, with one of the main structures being placed in the densest forest on the map. Overall, I don't think I would have this environment any other way (I bet I'll come to regret saying that). For a first try, this is not bad at all! And I hope to keep this streak up as we move into team activities.
Alright we're back on the topic of this anomaly. The Junior Programmer pathway continues to be a, lets say interesting, part of the GAD course. I often find it extremely frustrating and difficult to follow, but what I have been able to learn from it is significant regardless. My process of learning simple C# script may not be significant in its current state, but still holds incredible importance for being basic knowledge of programming, which applies to so many things in regards to game development. I see this knowledge as being important in the future to some degree, as knowledge of any form of programming is not exactly a common trait among people. And having knowledge in this field can serve as a bit of a head start for whatever I decide to do in college. My skills in regards to these lessons has improved, mainly as I find it easier to pick out and resolve errors, but still have to work on making code from scratch carry out the desired affect. This is still something I have to work on as I continue to work through the rest of the pathway, and is essential to understanding programming as a whole. That being said, my frustrations mostly came in the form of technical issues, as I consistently found myself unable to publish minigames into a playable form, meaning all of my submissions involve the use of screenshots or videos. I have yet to overcome these issues as they appear to have no reason to be occurring in the first place, and may have to do with my computers processing power, an issue I am most likely unable to resolve myself. And such issues may continue to make the rest of the pathway a pain going forward. I've come to appreciate what this pathway is teaching me as a whole, as its overall importance in game design is not understated. I hope to get through this pathway and continue to learn something meaningful, regardless of how painful the process may be.
After working with Unity for a little while longer, my opinion has begun to sour, if just by a little bit. I often find myself unable to move forward with certain assignments purely due to the sheer amount of time I spend tackling issues over the smallest detail. This issue mainly occurs with code, and like always when it comes to programming for me, following the tutorials exactly as shown still does not work. I find this issue to be far more prominent with 3D templates as a whole, 2D on the other hand has proven to be far nicer to me, which is why I'm more drawn to Unity for it's 2D aspects. I also as a whole find the 2D templates to be far more appealing due to the flexibility for hand-drawn and other visual aspects, which are difficult to run in a 3D setting. Some of my favorite 2D games are the types that make use of a distinct artstyle, whether it be pixel, paint or any other method the developers can come up with. And I feel it's this potential that's helping me hold on to the engine as a whole rather than abandon it out of frustration. My comments on these issues may be brief, but they're far more important than they seem, as it could affect my faith in the engine as a whole, and I really do hope it doesn't come to that point. I enjoy the aspect of giving different types of are a more concrete form through the engine, and I seriously don't want technical issues to be the end of it
Well it finally happened, we got around to the Unity game engine. This was something I had been anticipating for quite some time now, and was impressed in a number of ways, but also left a bit confused in others. As a whole, the engine has a ridiculous number of features, meaning almost every aspect, every mechanic that may be created in a game, is taken into account here. Coding, check, 3D modeling, check, 2D animation, the list goes on and on. It very easy to get lost in this vast expanse of stuff, which can make it a bit overwhelming at times. But can prove to be worth it in the end As a whole, I found it easy to manage elements and their parameters in the inspector window, as everything is laid out quite simply. It's not difficult to find out what does what, and to apply some interesting features to the props. On the other hand, there were a few things that did not make a lot of sense, like asset management. Taking assets from an external source to import into the engine can be a unnecessarily complex, as downloading the assets doesn't work half the time, sometimes they aren't compatible with the scenes, and other times they don't interact well with the parameters set on them. That being said, coding also presented a few issues for me, just simply by not working. I personally don't pay that too much attention, as anything involving movement or animation in the past has had a history of just not working, for no reason at all. All in all, the Unity assignments gave me serious headaches, drained me of all energy, and occasionally turned my computer into a nuclear warhead. But, they still hold enormous potential, and have presented a good number of interesting mechanics to me, especially the 2D modes. I still look forward to using this in the future, as a good number of my favorite games have come out of this, and I am aware of the capabilities it has. I'm not going to immediately forget about it, no matter how much pain the tutorials bring me.
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AuthorI have a passion for creating things, and hopefully one day those things will be video games. You can check over on this blog if you wish to see any updates on my work or other subjects. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools.
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