Today we made a better version of our game in a fraction of the time thanks to Unity’s physics engine, and had enough time left over to recreate our paddles using prefab scripts.

In our latest class, we established our collision and bouncing system using a two-step process:

1. Identify whether or not our ball was still inside of the field of play
2. If we are outside of the box, figure out what our position inside should be and move the ball there.

To use this, we will run a number of checks and scenarios using the “if/elseif” and “switch” conditional statements.

In today’s class, we discussed the principles behind what makes an “animation” – the rapid succession of images that create the illusion of movement. We discussed the difference between display rates of monitors (refresh rate) and game engines (frame rates), and covered a little bit of “vector math” which we will use to position and move objects.

In class today we covered some of the basic rules and concepts of code, such as how to declare a variable, the importance of type, and why you should never confuse = (assignment) with == (is equal to).

Next we started out making our own version of Pong which we called “Ping”. We used Unity primitives to create a playing field, changed the color of the playing field with a material, and set the camera position to give us a top down view.

(Slides and Zipped project from today’s session are available on the course Box folder)

Today we took a closer look at Unity Hub, the file structure of a Unity Project, and made our first application… an eternal fountain of prefab boxes.