Project Prototype

 

For my game project this week, I began by putting theory to practice and started building my first prototype of the game in Unity.

 

I have imported a few assets which were used in previous Unity tutorials, such as the mountain dome from the first tutorial and the animal objects from the second tutorial. I also added a simple white plain so it didn’t look like the animals were just floating in the air.

 

Screenshot of work in progress project prototype

 As you can see the stage for the environment is not complete. I decided to leave the game’s environment as it is to help me visualize as I’m looking to focus on getting the game itself working and running smoothly.

 

This week, I decided to focus on getting three things for the game up and running:

 

Player Movement – This was not difficult to do as the first unit of the tutorials covered this. I was able to get the character to move and rotate based on the player’s horizontal and vertical output. However, I noticed an issue with the player’s movement in play mode once I have gotten the camera focus on the character.

 

Switching Characters – I was able to find a tutorial that showed how to create an option for the player to switch between different characters (game objects). I was introduced to code that we haven't touched on in previous videos. 

In this tutorial, the player needs to click on a button on the UI (User Interface) in order to switch characters. This is slightly different than what I had planned where I decided for the player to use the Ctrl key to switch between animals. However, it got me thinking that I could present the player with both options for switching characters to give the player a small option of choosing what they’re comfortable with in case there are too many game keys for the player to remember.

 

Camera Focus – I also did a recap on the first unit of tutorials in order to make the camera follow the player. However, I set mine different for my game as I wanted the camera to change position according to the animal’s size to make it feel like the perspective changes a little bit. So I wrote the code differently than in the tutorial.

Tutorial

 

My Code

To give some context, I have made an empty player object and nested two animal objects inside the player object. (This is to be able for the characters to switch.) I can’t say I have noticed a difference in perspective. I need to mess around with the positioning more. A problem that occurred when trying to do it this way is that player movement is a lot more rigid. The player moves a bit slower and the camera is a bit shaky.

 

Also need to figure how to make my IDE accept decimals for the XYZ camera position.

 

My focus for next week:

Main: Refine GDD. Include all assets, tutorials, sketches and any area of the game that I wasn’t sure about I need to work it out before I continue. I feel like I need to scale down a bit of my game idea as well.

Afterwards, I will continue adding on the game interactions.