Understanding Game Engines

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.

Today we took care of some outstanding issues with our game – the use of TextMeshPro was revisited (this time working properly on my machine), we added the explosion effect prefab to the enemy objects, we finished the missing implementation of our “SwapFrames( )” function, and we looked at the build process for Unity, whichcontinue reading

Today I demonstrated my favorite method for making cool voxel enemies that appear to animated. The process is relatively simple, and when we add explosion effects it gives everything a great juicy quality. We also looked at Unity’s preferred method for text rendering, TextMeshPro, and implemented a sample overlay message. (TMP uses different libraries and types than Unity’s Legacy Text, so your code from the previous project will require some adjustment).

Today we implemented our game flow using another singleton, the GameManager, to coordinate this journey.

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.