Video Tutorial: Making a Simple Arcade Game in Unity

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Hey folks - I don’t post much around here but I keep an eye on things and check in often enough, so I thought I’d post this here. I’m (attempting to) run a local game development meetup group in Syracuse, NY. We’re just getting started and who knows how it’ll turn out, but I’d like to capture whatever talks or demonstrations we do and post them online. This is the first meetup’s talk (and personally my first time putting together a video of this kind), so I’d love any comments and criticism to help make them better in the future. Keep in mind that this particular presentation was rerecorded after the fact, but most will hopefully be captures of the live meetup so they’ll be affected by that format.

Making a Simple Arcade Game in Unity: http://vimeo.com/18983027

From the description:
This is a (long) walkthrough on making an arcade game in Unity. You’ll be introduced to the basics of developing in the environment, and along the way make a box move with mouse input, get attacked by enemies that follow the player, create particle effects and explosions, and fire lasers and physics-based force blasts. Work is done entirely in the Unity environment (and the Monodevelop IDE for programming in C#) using standard meshes they provide for prototyping.

Feel free to grab the final project files or follow along and get there on your own.

The Syracuse Game Makers meetup is a local group in central New York with the goal of enabling game creation in all its forms. I’d like to try and capture our demonstrations and tutorials as much as possible to make them available to wider audience (as well as those who couldn’t make it to the event). Thanks for watching, and if you’re in the area, drop by and say hello at the next meetup!

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Nicely done. Always good to see a fellow East Coaster rock out some game stuff.

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Thanks a lot for this Matthew. It was very helpful for me at least. :slight_smile:

I notice that at the end of your tutorial, you said that in the next tutorial you will show how to make the application interact with a Google App Engine and so on. Is that still your plan. If so, approximately when do you plan to release it and will it be on vimeo as well?

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thank you this is really helpful for me as a beginner :slight_smile:

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Thanks for the interesting work!
I just encountered an contrasting point where you made a reference for the ParticleSystem (From 42:00).
The Problem:
In my Unity 3.5 0f5, when I introduced the reference as ParticleEmitter, it’s not possible to assign the ParticleSystem prefab - which you named EnemyExplosion - to the PlayerStatusController script controller!
In return, I had to introduce the reference as ParticleSystem:

[quote]
Public ParticleSystem EnemyExplosionEffect;
.
.
.
ParticleSystem explosion = (ParticleSystem)Instantiate(…
[/quote]I’d like to know why this happened, and how it works on the others’ machines?
Thanks.

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I’m having this same issue. Have you found a solve for it? Very interested in fixing this, as this method of assigning seems to be broken with the new version of Unity.

EDIT: I see that you’ve type casted it as a ParticleSystem. This fixed it for me, with the “emit” line of code modified to be:

explosion.Emit( 1 );

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This is exactly what I was looking for - you sir are a gentleman :smile:

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Great work.

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For anyone having problems with particle systems i was able to fix that problem by changing the code like this;

public GameObject EnemyExplosionEffect;
...
GameObject explosion = (GameObject)Instantiate(EnemyExplosionEffect, enemy_position, Quaternion.identity);
Destroy(explosion, 4);

Second line both initiates the system and makes the particles fire off so no need to use the emit function. Also we dont have an auto-destroy option in particle systems on the last version, just use that last line to destroy them after x amount of seconds(4 in this case).

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Hi Matt,

Concerning: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/74662-Video-Tutorial-Making-a-Simple-Arcade-Game-in-Unity

Do you have a revised link for the final project files? Great project, following your Vimeo video closely, but the resolution of the video doesn’t quite permit me to see all text clearly.

Here was the old link, through Syracuse Game Makers: Meetup | Find Local Groups, Events, and Activities Near You

A great service! You have created an excellent bridge for the neophyte into a great tool.

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(bookmarked)