Unity: First steps
So I wrote yesterday evening about unity. After I published the post, I started to make a little Jump'n'Run. I think it is a good way to get to know unity, because it covers a wide range of needed features:
- Camera movement and controll
- Controlling "the player"
- Collision detection (unity does all the heavy lifting for you)
- Triggering death and finishing a level
- Loading new levels on success
- Reloading the level on death
- Collection points while running through the levels
- Animation (I animated the "coins" to bounce up and down)
What did I learn from this?
- When you want to do an animation on a prefab ("template" for assets) you need to create the animation on it, but you can only changes the values on an existing GameObject. Furthermore I noticed, that I needed the prefab to be contained into a parent. Otherwise the animation will work with absolute values, and all your GameObjects which inherit from this prefab, will be in one place (at least if you have a positioning animation). With a parent, the positioning will work relative to the parent. Took me a while to figure this out .
- The community is great, and seems to be very noobie friendly (as long as you care to search first)! Every question I got was asked before, no need to ask for myself
- Controlling the character takes a lot of time to tweak. And as you can see, I didn't managed to do it the right way. The controls are still a little bit blury.
- There isn't realy much coding.
Today I tryied out the building options - As you can see I attached here a build of the web player. Control your "character" with WAD (yeah, there is no S ), jump with space. It is a bit small, but it demonstrates how quickly you get something to show with unity.
There is surly enough space to polish this up, but it wasn't ment to be a finished game. Just something to learn from.
Next up ... maybe I'll try a breakout clone. I'm sure there is something to learn from
Unity 3D … My next challenge
Again ... no posting for a longer period. Yes, I'am kinda lazy Dispite my lazyness I manage from time to time to get my focus on some things. This time it is Unity 3D. You may be familiar with it - it is "just another" game engine.
But this one is special. Not only there is a free license for it, you can build your games for Windows, Mac, Linux (with version 4) and the web. If you are willing to pay, you can even build for Android, iOS, PS3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii and Flash. Pretty awesome right? But wait there is more! There are no anual fees or royalties per title!
Unity will make all the heavy lifting for you
- Rendering
- Lightning
- Terrain
- Physics
- Audio
- Networking
The editor itself is very user friendly. Not sure yet, but for coders maybe a bit too friendly I'm used to use my Keyboard a lot - with Unity I need my mouse more often than usual.
A killer feature is the ability to start the current scene you are working on directly from the editor. You can even tweak some attributes and make changes while playing.
Unity also comes with a asset store, where you can purchase things like models, materials, audio, scripts, particle systems, editor extensions or even complete projects.
I'm looking forward to create somthing I can publish again