Today, 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.

All lessons this week are strictly educational, so there is no deliverable based on these, but I strongly recommend trying to follow along as these systems are very useful for developing your own games.

It’s not always “one jump, one kill” in the land of side-scrolling platformers. Today we looked at some alternate approaches to handling player/enemy interactions. (These are not required for your final project… you already have everything you need there. This week is all about how to do other cool things with Unity Engine now that you know the basics! )

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”. Next we looked at 2D Effectors, physics components that let us add behaviors to our collider objects. Let’s go!

In this section we look deeper into Unity’s UI system, including the various configurations for the Canvas, creating and navigating our own Buttons.

Today we took a look at the Scene Manager, which allows us to make the jump out of our scene and into new ones. This introduces some challenges when we want to retain information or objects between these scenes, and so we look at how we can use the singleton pattern to help us manage this process.

Today we dive deeper into the Animator Controller, which operates much the same way as our state engine, transitioning us between clips based upon parameters that we will set via scripts. We also look at how to animate properties beyond the Sprites themselves.

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 completed our Character Controller, and then took a deep dive into Sprites. We examined how to import and properly configure these images, split Sprite Sheets into multiple sprites, how to convert sprite into Tiles, and finally how to make levels using Tilemaps.

Unity has a bunch of great components that make game development much easier, but one thing they are still missing is a 2D version of a Character Controller. So today we found a 2D controller that uses 2D Physics and modified it to make it our own. Let’s dive in!

Today we started into our new Side Scroller project with an overview of the 2D configuration of the Unity Editor, as well as an introduction to sorting layers and 2D Physics, creating a simple “top-down” character controller.