This is my first post on my 3rd term and it mainly includes my progression over the first couple of weeks, my introduction to coding in unity and some tests involving making a ball bounce and spiral as either an animation of game mechanic. I will also be showing off my intent for certain code scripts for later on projects in unity.
The first thing I learnt was something I had done in a previous term but I was happy to relearn it for this new term and for my memory's sake. To start with something simple, I made my first script in unity using visual studios and I was surprised that it gave you a couple lines of code brackets upon every new script made. I had previously thought when I last did coding in year 13 that it was blank, maybe that was a different service after all. This script named "Hello world" would allow an object when played in the scene to send a message in the console section of unity. The message read "HELLO WORLD" in capital letters and would repeat until paused. When paused and the scene was stopped another message would appear saying "BYE" on the console once more.
Up next we ramped up the difficulty to make a sphere act like a ball and move and spin a around in a circle, the code down below shows my progress in each of these tasks. I also put vectors into the code as well as speed for each of the x and y axis. We looked into what makes a car a vehicle and put that in visual studios with public float as well.
first time script in visual studios for Unity
Receiving coded message
My updated code
my final code to make the ball move in unity
Pac-man game level script in notepad. basics.score
Next up I had to write Sudo code in notepad on how to make a tea and using that I was able to do something similar for Pac-man. Sudo-code is useful for writing code before putting it into visual studios and laying out where certain information points should go, like score, player movement and script names. With the Pac-man version I wrote down what score each fruit token in-game awards the player as well as the descriptions of all the ghosts and what each can do and how different they are to the players character.
"Green Pac-Man" and blue ghost cutouts made as physical prototypes.
Pink and orange ghost cutouts made as physical prototypes.
In-between making a Pac-Man themed level in unity using probuilder and Maya for ideas, I started at home to make physical prototypes since I remember in class someone saying that physical prototypes can be useful too. Especially if game makers want to grab their target markets audience, similar ones are made using playdough and Lego building bricks.
I at home looked at the 2d designs online and made coloured cutouts of the Pac-man characters. Pinky and the orange ghost have different sizes and shapes between them. Where as the blue ghost is the same cutout but a different colour than the orange one. Now I know that people have picked up on this already but yes you do not need to retune your television, my Pac-man is green instead of yellow. This was because at the time I had no yellow paper at home until my parents found some the next day. Its started to grow on me thought as it could be an actual mechanic, like if you span round too much as Pac-man he would turn green and become queasy.
Example of Pac man level made in unity
10 moving balls in unity
SpawnSphere script
SphereMover Script
Using 10 spheres to make a small spinning spiral pattern animation in unity.
Adding 100 spheres to make an even bigger spiralling pattern
The next major thing to experiment with a sphere in unity and its code was to make lots of them all move at once. This code involved adding coordinates and speed to the sphere so that the spherespawner could spawn 10 of them in a single area. The spheres spawned could start spinning in a circle and then stretch out into a large tail whip and then return to its original shape. Afterwards we amped up the amount of spheres in the scene to 100 which created an even bigger spiraling pattern which was a spectacle to witness and was relieving to see working after all the effort made.
Making a ball fall and the platform beneath it spin
Testing the spheres bounciness and making the platform turn into a Padel Racket like in tennis.
Lastly I had to make a sphere become a bouncy ball, in order to do this, I need to add a new physics material which would allow me to change the mass and bounciness of the object to let it have a greater impact when sued in this scene. I started by making the ball fall on top of a rotating platform and making it spin at the ball fell down on it. Then I started to mess around especially with my first prototype on the third page of this blog site. I was having fun testing how bouncy the ball could be by moving it higher and higher after each test. I eventually made the altered the moving platforms properties by freezing its x, y and z axis positions. This was so I could not make it spin in every other direction and only spin when the ball hits it directly. This created a tennis esc effect where the platform acted like sports racket which propelled the ball towards the screen.