This past week has mostly been spent learning more Unity as, coming into this course, I was a complete beginner with the engine. Paul’s Unity Workshop on Friday was informative, showing me how to utilise canvases and the importance of creating layouts catered to the areas you wish to work on. I have also experimented with the Flappy Bird (2013) project provided and changed aspects of the code to see how that effects the game. As well as this workshop, I have been following along with more YouTube tutorials (Imphenzia, 2020) that took me through the process of creating simple games from scratch. Through these tutorials I have gained knowledge on the basics of coding in C Sharp, parent / child objects, common components, prefabs, animations and loading new levels. I still have a long way to go before I become fully comfortable with the engine, but this new knowledge will definitely help me to make further modifications to Flappy Bird (2013).
After further brainstorming and fine-tuning, I feel that I have settled on some ideas that are achievable within my skill set and of an appropriate scope. This monitoring of scope has been greatly helped by my recent experience of working in teams for the GAM110 project for which we are creating a board game inspired by the Royal Game of Ur. Everyone in our team had great, expansive ideas, however we had to remind ourselves to be realistic and work within a scope that is conceivable and won’t require excessive play testing to balance. I am glad to be able to transfer this mentality over to this personal project for GAM150, whether I choose to pursue the Flappy Bird (2013) mod or the 2D side-on mod.
Following some trial and error, I was able to replace the columns with some pixel sprites I had made in Photoshop by dragging their sprites into the renderer within their prefabs (fig. 1) I also changed the background to be a farm (also made in Photoshop), by dragging the image into the SkyTileSprite’s renderer. While this isn’t a gameplay modifier, I still like how it changes the aesthetic of the game.
(Above) Figure 1: The game running with some of my own created assets.
So far, I am finding it difficult to make many gameplay modifiers, besides small changes to jump height and gravity, as there is a lot to delve into within the project (most of which I am unfamiliar with.) Because of this, I have spent some time this week reading through the code and trying to understand what each line does. I know that being fluent in coding is not essential to a game designer’s role but it helps us gain more understanding of the process and builds towards our ‘T-shaped’ skillset which will be valuable in an industry context.
If I were to stick with this mod as my final submission, I would like all assets to be created by me. After learning more about it in this weeks GAM150 workshop, I think I would also like to change the context of the game (perhaps continuing with the farm theme), add a shooting mechanic, and enemies to kill.
Going forward, I need to make more assets, and think about how I will implement significant changes to the core gameplay. I will likely watch more tutorials to enhance my knowledge of Unity, as well as attending Paul’s workshop on Friday. If I get stuck I will access the wide range of content available online or, failing that, email one of my lecturers about a specific problem.
References:
Flappy Bird. 2013. dotGears.
IMPHENZIA. 2020. LEARN UNITY – The Most BASIC TUTORIAL I’ll Ever Make [YouTube user-generated content]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwZpJzpE2lQ [accessed 30 September 2020].