Hello world, plus a game and a half for showcase

Community Showcases
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EDIT: Shameless self bump - new alpha 2.4 release! Now with added aliens! And dinosaurs! And zombies! See post 8 for details!
ok, so it doesn’t have dinosaurs. And the zombie quotient is somewhat lacking too.

Hello world bit first - hello, I’m Matt :smile: Network bod by trade, occasional programmer by nature.

Thanks to a certain recession, found myself with a bit of free time (if anyone needs a Cisco bod in the south west UK…) and installed Unity 10 days ago now. Have messed around with odd bits of programming for a long time now but couldn’t say I got particularly deep into any given language, good enough for odd little utilities and the like. My first ever game was a modification of this: Space Mines - a long long time ago :smile:

My goal with Unity for the time being would be to make something which could hypothetically sell. Nothing far fetched, lets say if I think I might be able to make something which could hypothetically, for example, make the cost of a Pro licence then I’d consider that a success. At that stage I could in theory look at other avenues for paying the bills but being realistic that’s a way off.

Anyhow, onto the showcase part. After going through Will Goldstone’s franky excellent tutorials at http://www.unity3dstudent.com/ I made my very first Unity game. Nothing fancy, just utilising a bit from each of the tutorials, some physics, some loops, instantiating and destroying, basic program structure and flow etc.
Doesn’t really have a name, but Wrecking Ball is as good a description as any: http://www.mattandem.plus.com/unity/wreckingball/WebPlayer.html

So with that under my belt I’m obviously ready to make Call Of Modern Warcraft :smile:

…or maybe not. So game number two is the work in progress, a little top down shooter. This one has been hell, but in a good way of sorts. Every single part has taken hours and hours. Bullets spew out as fast as they can every frame - that took hours to fix, bullets instantiating in global rather than local forward, more hours, turrets trying to shoot through walls - hours, “heat seeking” missiles took an easy day’s worth to get right. Every little step I took I literally hit a wall; pity the same could not be said for my NPCs which quite happily warped through them till I spent a few more hours getting that right :smile: But I really do see this as a good thing, because each and every step has forced indepth research into the manual, and a much better understanding of program workflow; there are definitely code snippets from the interwebs in here but every single one has been researched and recreated line by line until I actually understood what was happening and how to fix it - and for every problem I realised there were multiple ways to fix it which forced yet more research into figuring what would be the likely best way for a given situation.

So game number two, again no name(“Shooter” for now), and very much a work in progress - it’s kind of playable, but obviously needs fleshing out, I think we’re over the halfway mark - http://www.mattandem.plus.com/unity/shooter/WebPlayer.html - WSAD/arrow keys to move, space to fire.

I realise I’ve written War Peace, so I’ll wrap up with a final word about art. When people show me their four year old kid’s finger painting I get intense pangs of jealousy at the artistic genius on display. Every single model in the above two games is just the included spheres, cubes cylinders bashed together. I made my first ever bumpmap today (the inner wall in the shooter game - original texture not my work), but I still can’t figure out how to make a wall in Blender (or even Sketchup) to apply it to - literally spent more hours in Blender trying to make an 841 wall to replace the current stretched cubes (and still can’t get it). Suffice to say I’m probably going to give up on the art side :smile: I enjoy learning new bits about coding, but whilst I wish I could make models and textures I’m really not enjoying the art learning process at all.

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Hey welcome!

I played them both and like the gameplay. I laughed when I was worried so much about running out of time, my crane tripped over a brick and fell over! And the shooter game was fun too. It is funny I come from the other side of it, playing around with the models and muddling my way through the coding!

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Welcome! Well you actually made a game, and it’s fun, those are the most important things. Keep at it. :slight_smile:

Gameplay Notes: When i finished the shooter (reached the final room and killed everything in that room) I realized my score was still zero and there was no end-game condition. Another bit, if you let the enemy… spheres… get close, your shots don’t hit them.

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You’re both very kind :slight_smile: The second one really isn’t populated yet, beyond the turrets and the first couple of waves of flying blob thingies. As such I’ll be putting in more enemies plus bosses in the spinny light rooms - then need to tweak balance. The moving enemy AI needs some work, at the moment they just rotate toward target and move within firing range - this leads them getting confused by walls and riding over the top of eachother a bit - which is one of the reasons player bullets won’t hit them as their Y axis is too high, other reason being that player bullets are instantiating a bit too far away from player at moment. Also need scoring, perhaps a time constraint too (or score modified by time), and a death condition - at present player health is calculated but you are in a god mode.

edit: basic scoring system now in, score is modified by time (currently divided by 5+(time.time/20)) as a basic (and somewhat forced) pressure / replayability mechanic.
edit 2: saucers riding up over eachother resulting in player being able to hit them at altitude now fixed! Lots of work on collision avoidance raycasting which killed the framerate, followed by lots of work on collision correction which also started impacting framerate on busy screens, finally fixed by the exceedingly simple move of stretching the collider vertically such that ride up wasn’t possible - simplest solution often the best :slight_smile:

For movement AI I’m thinking something like raycasting forward to discover if anything is very close, then moving at a perpendicular angle instead (ie. 90 degrees from the direct path to the player, but in the direction along that vector that would be closest to the player).

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ice, I like your style. You kinda came at the same way I did, text based modding of other games, to making my own. Its amazing how much you learn by making a couple simple games. BTW, your games are pretty fun. And yeah, blender sucks to learn. Try Blender 3D: Noob to Pro - Wikibooks, open books for an open world

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Hey and welcome to unity :slight_smile: Love the games, the art style is pretty dang cool as well :slight_smile: nice and responsive controls which is pretty sweet. I read your first paragraph, and my first game, was identical to your first game - in fact I had to snap a picture to prove it ( bad quality phone pic ) :

It started a life long obsession with space mining I think :slight_smile:

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That’s the book! So impressed you’ve still got a copy, I used to get one out the library each week :smile: That was a really good series, introduced a whole generation of 8 year olds to IF/THEN statements, WHILE loops and even DIM arrays :smile:

Bet you had a mining laser on the back of your Cobra MkIII as well didn’t you? :smile:

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hehe yup :slight_smile: Though I only ever had the tape version of that, was always sad that I could never get a disk version, felt I missed out on all those different ships :slight_smile:

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Shameless self bump to promote version alpha 2.4 of the as yet untitled “Shooter” top down shootery thingy now featuring the patented “Feck it, it’ll do” art system!

The all new “Feck it, it’ll do” art system boasts brand new features such as:

  • New interior walls featuring not 1000, not 2000, not even 3000, but 12 whole polygons! This breakthrough in graphical rendering allows for brand new features such as:
  • Baked lightmap shadows!
  • Better than before texture wrapping! (though still quite bad)
  • Rockets that decal actual 32*32 pixel holes in walls - JUST LIKE IN REAL LIFE!

Coding improvements brought to you by the power of Kronenbourg 1664, DJ Champion’s “Chill 'em all” album on permanent repeat, and hoodies for thirtysomethings include:

  • Scoring system that validates your worth as an individual!
  • Enemies that don’t ride over the top of eachother like excitable un-neutered pets!
  • Frame rate that doesn’t bog down like a tortoise on mogadon the moment a mere GAZILLION bullets start flying!
  • Even more aliens!

The Alpha Force is strong in this one! Meaning…

  • You’re still in god mode as have yet to code player death/respawn. I’m thinking Stella Artois, Limp Bizkit and black sweat tops for that session. Health meter works though.
  • Many areas relatively empty and in need of more “frikken laser beams”.
  • Balance is in need of serious tweakage.
  • So as to avoid waking young children, “Un-named shootery thingy v. alpha 2.4” is currently quiet as the proverbial mouse in a library being sternly stared at by a strict librarian with an Uzi 9mm. May have invented an all new proverb there…