My Foray into Unity

Hello everyone! It is jolly fun to be here and creating games. I guess this is going to be my first attempt at making a game. Following the advice of my wonderful daughter she got me up and running with Playmaker, which is rather useful scripting engine as programming is too advanced for me.

Finding my way around the unity interface took some time at first and the play making tutorials took some time to understand. But the following article made for easy understanding;

On the advice of my daughter, I am to keep the palette muted and external functions are banned or strictly limited. I guess this is kind of like the age old question of whether the 'zorn' palette is better than the traditional palette of alizarin crimzon, ultramarine blue, burnt umber, titantium white, and lemon yellow. (I prefer the latter)

 

I also managed to complete the ball roll tutorial which was rather fun too. Playmaker has a useful function to control the camera which negates the camera's rotation.

 

That's awesome! Playmaker is really good and you will enjoy it. You may even find yourself eventually trying out programming - Playmaker in many ways will prepare you to understand the logic and program flow involved and give you a little bit of a head start in a way. But even if you don't, it's a powerful tool on its own and can be used to make all sorts of things.

Keep it up!!

 

Thank you so much

Just finished the FPS tutorial with my daughter today. She makes an awfully good instructor, sadly without her, I would be lost within the interface. It was rather straight forward, making sure we added the character controller, then the simple controller action, and finally some tweaks to the camera.

 

Click state on a light

 

This is possibly my favorite thread ever.

 

tomas was alone

It may be worth while viewing this for the dialogue system??

 

As someone completely new to this stuff it's a heck of a lot to take in. How well do you understand the roles of and relationships between Scenes, GameObjects and Components? That's not a test or anything, just being conversational.

 

Oh goodness, now you're asking for a miracle. If I understood my daughter correctly, as we are learning together, unity is separated into three primary divisions, namely 'actions, events and states.'

These are the three tabs across the playmaker interface. Can you confirm if this is about right?

 

Playmaker is separated that way. Playmaker is centered around the use of finite state machines (FSM). Each FSM has a number of states that it can be in but only one of them can be active at once. Your currently active state is changed through events and when you enter a new one one or more actions can be performed.

For example in Pong you could have an event that checks if the ball has gone out of bounds and if it has switch to a "Player Scored" state where it performs actions to (A) increase the score of the player opposite of where the ball left the playfield, and (B) reset the ball back to a starting position for the next round. Once that is complete it would move back to another state to continue play.

Hopefully I'm not complicating things. There are video tutorials available from the developer of Playmaker if you want to try them. While we tend to recommend that people follow along with the tutorial just watching them may help a little.

https://hutonggames.com/tutorials-game-design-with-playmaker.php

 

No not at all, it is wildly interesting, and guidance is always welcomed.

I dare say that would make more sense to my daughter, to me it's like latin I'm afraid . We're both somewhat learning unity together, although I do suspect she is rather enjoying it more than me. From what I can gather when she stops furiously clicking away on the screen and stops to talk, she wishes to use 'Playmaker' and in time, she's going to learn to script, but as of late, she has no intermediate goals to pursue that avenue.

In the mean time, a fun spawning test using create game object

 

Navmesh agent -> adding the playmaker navmesh addon package from the ecosystem.

 

What a rather productive sunday, I hope you all enjoyed the experiments thus far, and I had a rather jolly good old time.

Explosion force and particles.

 

vehicle mechanic

 

Progress updates

 

That looks a heck of a lot like something I made, once. I learned rather a lot about cars and relevant physics working on that.

 

A Gun bullet hole system

 

A rather bad attempt at pong, we will need to increase the speed of the ball and clamp the paddles.

 

A animation control

And then tomorrow I think we're going to work on going back and studying 2D properly.

 

Yes indeed We have yet to touch the wheel mechanics and braking sliding forces so it can become quite intense. I do hope you learned something useful that day.

 

A nice little array experiment, it would be useful to utilise such features for games like 'tic-tac-toe' and the imitable 'snake'



What happens is the function picks up the parent game blocks then loops through its children thus performing anther action, in this case we are scaling in the x after one second elapses.

 

It took me far more than a day, but I learned quite a few useful things, that's for sure.

 

Today's experiment was with 2D animation and what a fun it was. Using PSB files to import , rig and then animate within a window named 'the animation timeline.'

 

Today we started to try 2D lights. Rather slow progress I dare say, but educational nonetheless.

 

Another rather small experiment using shader graph. Jolly useful I would imagine

 

Today we attempted a rather odd looking airplane movement.

 

Today we worked on a frogger prototype

 

Can your frog get squished, and can you win if you get to the other side?

 

Haha, yes we are going to work on that logic today, well perhaps, not the squished part.

According to my daughter's schedule as we have my granddaughter's 3rd birthday today the plan is!!

1. Wire up the controls for example,up down left right movement with discrete set positions using relative positioning.
2. Check for game boundaries
3. Allow for random spawn positions of the cars (at the moment they are represented by black squares) and apply either a positive or negative horizontal translation.
4. Create the cars as a prefab, which automatically destroy themselves having exiting the screen
5. Add collision detection on the cars upon detecting a collision reset game state and return to main screen
6. Finally add a UI kit for storing number of lives and completion.
7. Add mouse jump sounds.

(Estimated time frame 1/2 hour to 1 hour)

Does that sound about right?

 

Well I do wholeheartedly apologise for anyone following, I didn't manage to complete the frogger tasks. After a rather rambunctious day with my family I was exceptionally exhausted.

Instead I decided to experiment with a long lost pastime of mine. In this particular instance, this was my first foray with water mixable oil paints, and what a delight it was to use.

This medium deliciously mixes with a buttery texture almost undetectable from original oils, the likes of the windsor newtons etc. The study, a favorite of mine. Edvard Munch. Using a palette of Alizarin Crimson, cad yellow, titanium white, ultramarine blue and burnt umber I was able to complete this little thing in under 3 hours!

Of course, it would be nice to get back to my area of expertise, classical and baroque art but I would need a lot more practice.

Thank you for following and maybe we'll have something for tomorrow.

Good day all.

 

Today we made a simple game, that spawns squares that rotate, change material when clicked and increments the count at the top. In order to facilitate this we used a 'global' variable

 

@scottymclue Wanted to stop in and see how your doing. And i see your having fun, and learning alot!.

Keep up the good work! Your journey has only begun...

 

Thank you I appreciate the positive encouragement!

 

A space invader trial:

 

A rather trivial 2D point lighting solution.

 

Hello chaps today we decided to tackle Pacman. I feel a brief description is needed, in essence we are going to create the base level, not to large, with the building block system, keeping them at unit distance, then we will add the player, the pickups (which will be triggers with ontriggers) then we build the navmesh, and finally, add the adversaries. Again, as mentioned before, the navmesh needs to be specially added from the playmaker ecosystem.

Here is our start.

 

A rather frustrating experiment with the timeline and the 'Animation' component, that's animation without the 'r.' Super confusing.

Within playmaker we need a get key up and get key down state, along with play animation and stop animation. We were not entirely sure if this is the best way to achieve a goal but it appeared to work?

 

Another super simple prototype level. The premise being we have a player that spawns either circles or crosses on the left hand side, depending on pressing the keys 'a' or 's' (which are completely arbitrary) Then on the right hand side we hand red circles or red squares that spawn randomly in the negative x direction. The point of the game is to collide with the corresponding shape. (Score increments as such, the game ends if you collide with a un-matching shape)

The speed increases ever so slightly as your progress.

 

What a fun little weekend, my daughter visited with the kids and her in-laws. Celebrated with a little retro game event with an old console connected to the television, and where we had a themed fancy dress Jolly good fun to just relax a little and enjoy the time. Did everyone else have a great weekend? I do hope so.

 

A quick, unrelated test inside UE5 to end the weekend. Enjoy.

 

This entire thread is excellent, quite a prodigious output.

 

Today as we're waiting for our midi keyboard to arrive via Amazon, we got around to playing with the free Orchestral kit, some of the sounds are rather intriguing!

We'd love to compose some music, as having been classically trained to read sheet music, key and time signatures setting the 'atmosphere' is so important.

What we learned was it's a three step process? At the moment we just have 'Native Access' and 'Kontakt Player' installed. But eventually we'll pick up a DAW and hopefully get to share our creative process. As always thanks for watching.

 

Keep up the good work Scott ! Have fun!

 

Hello everyone! Bit of a slow one, not much to report other than our midi keyboard arrived. A nice compact size, maybe we should have gone for a slightly larger one, but I guess that would be an option in the future should the need arise.

Overall, the process of 'layering' to create music is a fascinating but difficult procedure even with an array of production ready OST's VSTs. The thing that really confuses us is the 'DAW.' Honestly, it just seems so incredibly complex, almost like walking into a pilot's cockpit. I'm sure with practice it would make sense, but it's terribly off putting for complete beginners. Of them all 'Garage Band' looks the easiest- shame we're on a windows machine. Until next time.

 

A slow attempt at creating a health bar using the slider component, I was wondering if maybe it might be more purposeful to create a sprite and to then add and remove blocks instead. This is suppose wouldn't necessarily be best practice but I feel I could understand it more easily

 

An endless runner attempt

Part one complete, we will need to create a random spawn position and add a continuous translation of the walls per frame.

 

Half an hour later we have a slight improvement.

 

For simplicity we decided to remove the coins.

 

A very first attempt at a block roll type game, I'm not sure how simple this will be to create with playmaker, a useful attribute will be the rotateAround, that needs to be installed from the Playmaker ecosystem.

 

Well today, I took a little break as the 'rotateAround' for for the rolling cube was quite confusing. Instead a got out my pencil and an old art book and began drawing. I thought them rather nice so I decided to promptly frame them. Wishing everyone a lovely weekend! Until next time!!