First Playable - The Struggles of Unity

First Playable

For this week's project development, our task was to create a playable version of our games with some of the core features included. 

I struggled a lot this week with my Unity- it's like it was trying to fight me! Even though I made my map 50% smaller and removed the trees, to say it was framey and unresponsive is an understatement. When playtesting my game, it took a few seconds for it to respond to and clicking or moving. Because of this I didn't get to implement as much as I would have liked to this week, but still made some progress despite the struggles.

 

Eterna Hunt main menu screen

Source: My Unity project 

In my Unity free tutorials this week I created a main menu for my game, which drops the player into the world when the "Play" button is clicked. I still need to implement the options button features which I will do in the near future. This took me a little while to implement and to get working but I'm really happy with how it looks and works!

 

View of axe and gem

Source: My Unity project 

I added in a first person player camera, and decided to give the player an axe when starting the game. The axe includes C# code which allows it to swing and make a sound when the player left clicks, and it follows the player as they move. This is an important step for this playable as weapons play a big part in the survival aspect of my game.

I also added a collectable object to the game that makes a sound and disappears when the player walks over the object. The gem is just a placeholder for now until I find suitable assets to use in its place. I want to refine this more and add text to the object when hovered over, but my laptop was struggling so much that I had to leave it for now.

I used my knowledge from the Jimmy Vegas tutorials to implement these (I also had a look back as a refresher) as I find his tutorials are very easy to follow and he's also using the same version of Unity as me so it doesn't complicate things.

 

First person view 

Source: My Unity Project 

First person view of my game- I have to play around with adjusting the axe postion as I think it currently takes over the screen a little bit. I'm aware that the terrain is very barren at the minute, this is to preserve my laptop and be able to implement mechanics and features without as much lag a beefy terrain would bring.

While I do feel like I'm making decent progress I'm frustrated that I'm not really able to do more due to Unity being so slow. I have to try to find ways to combat this- perhaps I'll have to work from the college Macs instead of my laptop to get further into my development.

I'm most likely gonna have to cut out a ton of features I had originally planned to include for a more realistic project with the time I have to develop it, which is sad, but I'd rather have a functional game than one that's half broken. 

Next I'm going to hopefully implement some enemies and a health bar!

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Unity Free Tutorials

Unity Free Tutorials

For this week's Unity tutorials, we were tasked with finding 2-4 of our own tutorials to follow. I really liked doing this- as it gave me a chance to develop something for my game project.

This week I looked at some tutorials by Jimmy Vegas for creating a main menu, along with functioning buttons including a play button that loads the player into a scene of choice.

I thought I would stick to Jimmy Vegas tutorials this week as he is using the same version of Unity as I am, and his tutorials are clear and easy to follow (at least to me).

These are the two tutorials I followed.

I started off with creating a new scene in my project for the main menu. Using the UI GameObject, I created text which reads the title of my game, "Eterna Hunt". I then added a side bar and bottom bar and anchored them to the menu, and made them semi-transparent so that you could see the scene behind it which I made later. Using the button option, I created three buttons, one with "Play", "Options" and "Quit Game". 

This is where the tutorial got a bit confusing- Jimmy went on a bit of a tangent about the importance of text and button colour as some colours make a glitch where the button functionality doesn't work- so I just followed his advice and din't make my button black. I made sure to change the colours for when the button is hovered over and clicked to help distinguish it. 

I then went on to create a mini scene reminiscent of my main world- I built a terrain behind the main menu and made some mountains and painted textures and trees, and also moved the main camera to look down on the scene so that you wouldn't see any clipping.

Main menu demonstrating button hovering change

Source: My Unity project

The next step of this tutorial was to add functionality to the buttons using C#. 

As I find C# very confusing to follow and understand, I downloaded the script from Jimmy Vegas' website and applied it to my buttons, tweaking the code to remove buttons I didn't feel were necessary to include in my game which Jimmy did in his game, and to change the linked scene number to ensure the right scene would be opened when the play button is pressed.

And.., it worked! For once. 

What happens after you press the play button

Source: My Unity Project

I removed the trees from my world to reduce lag- I'm going to make the map smaller when I work on developing my game further during the weekend before I add them back.

I was so happy and satisfied seeing my world pop up when the play button is pressed, since C# tends to want to fight me and not work. Pasting the code provided by the tutorial definitely helped me in this regard and it's safe to say I'll be doing it for every script I have to make from now on.

The options and quit game button aren't functional yet, but I'll tackle it when I develop my game more during the weekend.

I'm looking forward to developing my game more, as seeing things come together is really satisfying for me!

Tech Tip Cheezburger

Tech Tip Cheezeburger

Upon realising that memes were a part of of the tech tips, I decided to make one on Cheezburger since 1. I need to catch up with some points and 2. cats are the best.

I saw a beautiful image of a cat peeking around a wall and it reminded me of myself constantly lurking around the kitchen corners whenever I put on a pot of pasta, so I put a similar caption on to the picture.

I made this using Cheezburger!

Though a bit outdated of a meme format, I did enjoy looking at all the cat pictures on the site and it has a certain charm to it.

Game Fun

Game Fun

"Fun" in games is a very subjective term and it's dictionary definition isn't helpful in understanding what makes a game fun. Though, in recent years game developers have a much better idea of what fun in games is all about.

Looking back at our evolutionary history shows our basic drives for survival, reproduction, social interaction in family and communities. Looking back in time is also beneficial as technology now has made a particularly potent play experience that is both new and old in it's origins.

Games are specialised, and play is deep rooted into our history and we can see it in other species. Basic things animals do such as play fighting, tumbling etc. is a way for them to practice survival skills. Taking this into account, these games/play are all about reproduction and survival and social rules and behaviours.

Playing is common in childhood, and technology and video games have promoted interest in adulthood, and our culture also promotes us to keep learning in life. These observations give path to a theory to explain why people get pleasure from leisure activities that honed their ancestor's survival skills. 

You can read the article here!

Another reading discusses player types and measure of fun in a MUD.

When people examined and evaluated a MUD (Multi-user Dungeon) and what aspects of them players enjoyed the most, the four things the majority of people enjoy when playing are:

Achievement within the game context, exploration of the game, socialising with others and imposition upon others.

We can divide these categories into four player types; achievers, explorers, socialists and killers. Players tend to drift between these

play types depending on their moods, but most players tend to have a primary play style.

Interest graph

Source: mud.co.uk

The axes in this graph represent the interest of a player in a MUD. Certain player types fall into different places on the graph, for example explorers are interested in interacting with the world, so they fall on the top right of the graph.