Understanding Game Engines

Today, we look at a number of tools for building and populating vast game environments with Unity’s Terrain System. This system generates (and regenerates) a terrain mesh at runtime that is optimized for our game, providing high level of detail at a close proximity and maintaining a low poly mesh for distant features, all tocontinue reading

This week we are looking at some advanced Unity features that we can use to create our own “first person shooter” (FPS) style game. We will take a look at tools for quick level generation, dive into Unity’s Character Controller, take a deeper examination of the offerings of the Physics library, and finally dip our toes into some Enemy AI. Starting today, our remaining lessons are no longer required to complete the assignments. From this point on, all lessons are strictly educational, but I strongly recommend trying to follow along as these systems are very useful for developing your own games.

For this class, we looked at a few more advanced techniques to enhance our platform games. The first is Animation Effects, which allow us to call a scripted event from inside an animation clip, which we used to make a “coin box”. Then we look at defining physics collisions, setting up areas that affect our physics with 2D Effectors, and finally look at Sprite Shapes.

No class for Week 8, but I have added some videos for a recent lesson developed for another class that feature a simplified character controller, as well as methods for attacking with stomp, melee, and projectile attacks.

Perhaps the most useful component of this is the OnDrawGizmos( ) and OnDrawGizmosSelected( ) method which can be used to draw info in your Editor’s Scene view. These are very useful for visualizing things like areas of effect, especially for those things that use triggers or physics calls. This method is called automatically by the engine just like “Update()” but are even running while the game is not playing, as this is an editor specific tool.

Check out the Unity Script Reference – Gizmos for more…

It’s time to bring our world and our characters to life. This week, we dive into the wonderful world of animation, specifically how animation is implemented in our engine.