Understanding Game Engines

Today we continued to develop our platform game by making our camera smoothly follow the player throughout the environment, implementing our ruleset for how the player can move through the environment (forward only, please!) and finally we added an enemy controller and gave it a patrolling “behavior” through the use of triggers (a special variation of colliders).

Today we continued to look at 2D level art creation tools with the Tilemap system, which lets us quickly generate sprite-based levels on a series of layered grids. Then we began to apply 2D physics to our character, a used a 3rd party script to control the character movement.

Today we moved on from attacking spaceships and onto a new project – the 2D platformer! We explored Unity’s 2D template, learned how to import and process 2D images as “sprites”. Tomorrow we will create our first Tilemap and let our player move around!

Today we looked at the build process, and also at Unity’s preferred method for text rendering, TextMeshPro, and implemented a sample overlay message. (TMP uses different libraries and types, so your code from the previous project will not work without some adjustment).

Today we mapped out our game flow and looked at how our various object interactions would move us through our state machine, and then used another singleton, the GameManger, to help coordinate this journey, then spent a little time at the end making cooler enemies. (You don’t have to do this for your game, but you may want to!)

In today’s class, we discussed strategies for audio, and covered the Singleton pattern – a very powerful tool (but also a potentially tricky/dangerous one) for organizing our game and exposing our “manager” scripts to the objects in our scene. Tomorrow we will create the Game Manager which will handle our game state and flow, and on Friday we will spice up our visuals and learn about the “build” process.

Today we took a closer look at the “parent-child” relationships of game objects, and how we could use this to coordinate our movement by “inheriting” a transform from the parent object.

Today we started out on our new game – “Astral Attackers” – a Space Invaders inspired alien shooter that we will use to illustrate the ways in which the objects in our object-oriented program interact to create gameplay.