The Build (week #4)

This week was definitely one of the most intense that I have experienced at this college in any subject due to the sheer amount of work I had to do to comply with the assessment brief. Although I did not have everything that the brief asked for such as a score system I was very proud about how it turned out. I created a prototype for a 2D top-down shooter with 2 types of enemies, a zombie which runs towards the player and a turret which does not move but constantly rotates towards the player and fires bullets at them. The player has 2 ways of destroying them, a basic gun shot with a fairly short cooldown and a grenade which explodes on contact with an enemy or after a short amount of time, inflicting an area of effect explosion which has a long cooldown period. The aim of the game was to survive as long as possible from the enemies with a high score board for who survived for the longest, unfortunately I did not have enough time to implement this into it. Although the prototype was not a fully-fledged game, it definitely set the foundation for some of my future work and perhaps this concept may be built upon. I was definitely happy with the work I had created especially due to the fact that I had no programming skills at the start of this year. 

A Game Designer’s struggle (Week #3)

In our tutorial this week we were asked to create an object that spawns faster as time goes on. I struggled with this quite a bit as I couldn’t find out how to do this using the unity scripting reference. I am new to programming and I didn’t believe that I should look at tutorials or ask my lecturer about this until I was completely unsure. I was too hard headed to ask how to go about doing this so I left myself quite disadvantaged while other students seemed to be moving along quite adequately. The tutorial this week was completely unproductive for me as I spent 2 hours trying to do one very simple task which in the end didn’t work out. This has taught me that I should ask questions as soon as a problem comes across in scripting. Later in my own time I discovered that the answer to scripting this was very simple and could be solved using simple mathematics and variables which subtract from the spawn time every time an enemy is spawned and forcing the minimum spawn time to stay at 1 second so that the game does not become too overwhelming or lag from the amount of objects in the scene.

Basic Enemy Script (week #2)

This week we were asked to design an enemy with 3 behaviours; enter, shoot and escape. Due to being ill I was not able to participate in this task in class but I was able to create an enemy AI suitable to the brief for our first assignment. For this assignment we are asked to create a 2D video game in Unity which must apply to a brief, this brief contains many points that our game should contain, the main ones being Dynamic Object spawning, level extents, escalating difficulty and audio. Through research I learned how to create a follow script for an enemy so that it is constantly rotating toward the player and moving in that direction. This script was also edited for a turret style enemy which does not move but rotates toward the player and instantiates bullets over a set time using a cooldown. With these I aim to create a simple top down shooter which features waves of enemies which spawn faster the longer the player survives.