First Person (week #5)

For our new project we are required to create a 3 Dimensional game which utilizes a 1st person or 3rd person camera. At the moment I am learning how to create a first person controller in order to understand how it works and so I can use it in the future games without the need to use only the standard character controller that unity provides, allowing more freedom with the scripting of it.

 The tutorial by quill18creates really helped me out through this process as he goes into great depth about the basic aspects of creating a first person shooter in unity. I think it is definitely worth checking out if you are new to scripting or creating first person shooters in Unity3D and here is a link to the tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhpJPx8fICQ .

next week I plan on discovering more about basics of  first person shooters as the genre is so popular at the moment and will definitely be beneficial to learn about for my game development career.

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.

An Introduction

Hi, My name is Peter and I have created this blog as an assessment task for a subject I am currently studying called Scripting for Game Developers as part of my Bachelor of Game Development. As the title of the subject I am currently studying suggests, I am learning to script code for video games which I believe will be extremely beneficial for myself due to my current lack of scripting knowledge and hopefully beneficial for the industry as I hope to erase some of the negative attitude conveyed toward it through the creation of my video games. This blog will outline my progression as a game developer, explain my scripting goals and hopefully acquire feedback and perhaps exchange information with other individuals in the industry. For this week's tutorial we learned some basic movement and camera scripts for a 3rd Person video game which I wish to improve upon by adapting those scripts to different genres such as 2D Platformers and first person shooters. I would like to achieve these goals so that I will be able to open myself to different possibilities and create enjoyable prototypes for different genres that may eventually become fully fledged video games. Learning the movement and camera scripts for different genres will assist in creating the most important part of a video game: the controls which will set the base for my wild imagination to build upon and also slightly improve my value as a  team member in the industry. Thank you for reading and please leave a comment on any thoughts you may have.