Public Ponder

So some of you may have read my previous post about showing off our groups game at a local game dev meetup. It's now just over a week since the event happened so I figured hey! now is probably a good time for an update!

Overall the game gained quite a good response and got a large amount of attention and had quite a good response from everyone who tried it out. The interest the game gained was also a good chance for us to promote our end of year show and hopefully drive some traffic towards it for when it happens. The biggest plus of the night for me was not only seeing the game get such a good response from people but also seeing some of my programming in action. One of the main scripts I had created for the game was the camera script which follows the player around the screen and zooms out at certain times in order for players to get a full view of the room they are currently in. For me it was the first time I had more than just a couple of people experience using my code and see how they responded to it, at the same time it also helped me see that if this code was working as intended and people had no problems using it then maybe the code I have been writing in my tutorials will also have the same response? 

In the next couple of weeks we'll all be working together to make our game, Ponder as good as it possibly can be before the end of year show on the 24th of June. I have quite high hopes for the game even despite the problems we've had during the games development. Everything seems to be going well so far, the gameplay is forming slowly and the game already looks absolutely fantastic, hopefully I'll have some more to post as well as maybe some footage after the event. 

Alongside this project I'll also be continuing development of my own projects with the intention of displaying them at the end of year show, keep an eye out for more on those projects soon!

Update Time!

So I've been pretty inactive on here for a while so I figured it's probably time for an update!

I've really been quite busy lately with multiple projects on the go as well as a big group project as part of the college course that I'm currently on. As a group we decided to create a small platformer game which is largely based around exploration with some small puzzle elements that we're currently in the process of adding to the current version of the game. 

At the beginning of the project we all had to pick a role we wanted, with my main skill being programming of course, I picked the programming role. Working with two other programmers on the team we split the different tasks out among us to make the workflow smoother.  I've taken on a lot of the puzzle based programming as well as other features like scripting the sounds to make a different variation play each time as opposed to the same sound over and over again as well as using "Lerp" to script movement to make our Wisp character move between different set points and a few other smaller parts. For me personally working on this project has been an interesting experience for me as it's one of the first times I've really worked in a "proper" team. Not only that but I've also learnt a few new programming concepts that I'll be able to adapt and use in future projects. 

So far we don't have much in the way of any real gameplay besides exploring the levels we have in the current build, however last week we started working on creating some simple puzzles to implement into our levels and we'll be spending time this week adding more to show at our end of year show. Despite not having much in the way of gameplay the game itself looks fantastic thanks to our art team. 

As part of promoting our game some of the team, myself included, are attending a local meet up this Friday to show off what we currently have and to not only get some helpful feedback but maybe even be able to get some people interested in coming in to the college to test the game out in the coming weeks.

Ill try to get another update out after tomorrow night as well as some info on other things I'm working on. Watch this space! 

Unity C# Tutorial: Creating Checkpoints

Checkpoints are a commonly used game mechanic in pretty much all games and surprisingly enough they're a lot easier to make than you may think. Using Vector3,tags and triggers you can create a simple checkpoint system to implement in your game. 

To start this one off you need to declare a Vector3 variable which will be used to store the location of the checkpoint. Open up your script and add in the code shown below.

This Vector3 will be used store the position of the checkpoint when the player enters it. It will also be used to reset the players position when they die or are killed, depending on the type of game you're implementing this in. Next you need to set up the checkpoint. For the purpose of this tutorial I'm going to use a cube as the trigger. 

The Red box will work as my checkpoint.

Now you have the checkpoint set up open up your script again to add a new void, this new void will be an OnTriggerEnter void. This void will take care of storing the checkpoints position in the Vector3 that you created earlier. Add the code shown in the screenshot below underneath void Update. 

This is almost all of the code you need to make the checkpoints work. Before adding the last bits of code you need to create a new tag, if you look at the if statement that you just added in the new piece of code you will see that the script will look for a "Checkpoint" tag whenever it enters a trigger. 

Clicking the button highlighted in the box will open the drop down tag menu.

This is the drop down menu that will appear after clicking on the tag option.

From the second menu that pops up click on one of the empty boxes and type the word Checkpoint into one of them. Go back to the Hierarchy and select your checkpoint object and set its tag to Checkpoint by selecting the tag you just created from the drop down list. Now this tag is set scroll down to the objects Box Collider and make sure the  Is Trigger box is ticked. 

Make sure this box is ticked. It's key to making the code work.

Now you have the main parts of the script setup and the necessary boxes ticked to make things work you need to add the last pieces of code. Open up your script again and add in the code shown below. 

Final piece of code!

Adding in this code now means that whenever the players Y position becomes less than 0 it will reset the players position to the same position as the checkpoint. Alternatively you can add the code shown below to make it so that when the player enters a trigger tagged as Death or Dead, essentially creating a death zone/barrier. 

This code isn't necessary but still works as a good alternative.

This is pretty much all there is to this tutorial! Let me know if this works or if you have any problems with this tutorial by contacting me on Twitter @markimo2 or alternatively leave a comment on this post. Also keep your eyes peeled for a video version of this tutorial.

Blender Quick Tip: Scaling Instead Of Extruding On Simple Shapes

This trick is something I've found extremely handy during recent projects as it's a massive time saver. Usually when it comes to extruding faces I do them one by on, while this process works it takes quite a while to do and not only that sometimes you find yourself left with gaps in the model which means you have to sit and merge them all together again.

This gets kind of annoying after a while...

This new method I found whilst working on another project cuts out a lot of the little extra changes you would need to make which of course is going to save you a reasonable amount of time, especially when it comes to more complex models. 

Look how fast that was!

As you can see from the Gif above It's a fairly simple process. Simple select the faces that you want to extrude, press "E" (the normal extrude button) but instead of moving the mouse to extrude the face or typing in a value to extrude it simply left-click to create the new faces. Now you have the new faces created and selected left click on the small box shown below,

And change it to the symbol highlighted in the picture shown here.

Changing this option makes it so that Blender takes the origin or center point of each of the faces and then scales it along that. With this option changed and the faces still selected hit "S" to scale the faces and move the mouse outwards and all of the faces will scale along their own axis. 

I've only really tested this on creating simple shapes like the cylinder shown in this tutorial and have encountered some small problems when testing it on more complex objects. (I'll edit this tutorial If I find a better way to do this with more complex models.). 

Experiment Blossoming Into A Game!

(Sorry about potato quality, yet to find a good video editor for free)

Earlier today I came up with an idea to try and make my own AI in the free version of Unity seeing as though it doesn't seem to feature any definite AI system. I started experimenting with the idea when I eventually made it to college and I couldn't seem to make the concept work. However all was not lost!

As my first attempt at making the system work included some input from the player I decided to try and make more of an AI behavior that would respond to the players movements. I set up a group of four cubes and went about creating the code  that would then make the AI (The red cubes) move in response to the player. The more I coded the more I realized, hold on a sec! The more I code of this the more separate scripts I'm using. I quickly hit that idea on the head and switched to using Unity's tagging system to give each AI a tag and then have them only react to a certain bit of code which was all compiled into one script (With many many if statements!). After a while of writing the code fully and testing to make sure it worked I started to come up with a new idea to turn it into a completely new game.

For some reason I'm stuck on the idea lately of taking any form of power or attack away from the player, I'm not entirely sure why but I do think it gives the player a bit more of a challenge. I've started out with the basic idea of creating a score based game with multiple different types of AI that spawn in with the plan of once this main mode is down and concrete adding another "Challenge" mode with a variety of different tasks for the player to complete. I'm intending to add a few different characters as well to try and add a little variety to the game to keep players from getting bored (Check back for updates on that soon!). 

This update ended up being a little longer than intended but hey! Trying to make these posts a heck of a lot more frequent so check back for more!