Hello there!
This one was a little delayed due to a few life updates and a lot of DIY! But I'm back in the saddle again with my weekly game dev work, and last week I built a side scrolling shooter.
(But I can't resist showing off my new setup :-))
I'm making these short games to refine my skills and learn more about Unity and this time I'm upping the complexity a fair bit from my endless runner in the last post. I will need a lot more than just running and jumping. There will be;
Shooting mechanics
Enemies
Pickups
Different weapons
Player hit points
On top of the platforming mechanics.
Something akin to the popular old arcade shooter, Contra
I built something a lot prettier than my last game and to make things even better, it was all my own art! Everything in the game that you can see was drawn / animated / programmed by me and it feels really nice to take full ownership of the project like that.
Pixel art exploration
I went on a little side quest to learn some techniques for doing my own pixel art. I've always liked the style and it seems like a very approachable way of creating great assets. I'm going to continue to practice because animation is still tricky.
I spent some time just drawing random objects and sketching. I'm probably most at peace when I'm in this zone. Just thinking about colours, lighting and shapes of objects.
I tried a few different illustration tools and ended up settling on a tool called Aseprite. A dedicated program for drawing and animating sprites. It only cost $15 and has been totally worth it so far.
Lessons learned building this
1) There are many ways to skin a cat / build a game. Unity really is a toolbox and it does come down to what tool is best for the job. But it is entirely contextual as you can for example, you can code shooting in different ways. Create bullet objects for every shot and do collision detection? Or draw invisible lines out from the gun tip and check if they hit anything. It depends on the game design as to what's appropriate.
2) I'm getting much better at using the ins and outs of Unity already which is exactly what I wanted from these projects. I'm feeling far more familiar with using all the tools Unity provides and creating and programming the behaviour for various entities is starting to feel more natural with no real friction.
3) As mentioned above, I learned how to draw, animate and export my own sprites. I think I have a naturally artistic brain which will really help me in the future if I want to create a game that stands out. Help! I'm an artist trapped in a programmers body! :-D
4) I have to give another shout out to using GiT - During the project I had to reinstall windows after my hard drive failed me. If my project wasn't in source control, I would have been doomed.
5) Not something I needed to learn, but I can not express how important it is to write clean and re-usable code. It will help you in future projects greatly!
Summary
Getting a second project under the belt feels really good, but recording everything I do for the game dev time-lapse is a little frustrating and editing a huge video at the end is fun ... but very time consuming! I also had to cut significant parts of the video since there is a 15 minute time limit.
Next time I think I will try a more standard vlog style where I narrate the video and talk about some of the challenges and plans I have for the current project and the future. We'll see how that goes. It's all good experience at the end of the day.
This isn't a project I imagine returning to, though naturally my designer brain is bursting with ideas on how a Starship Trooper themed shooter might work. I have other plans as I contemplate a V2 of System Raid. I think I'll be coming back to that soon.
So here's the time lapse of building the project - Enjoy and thanks for stopping by!
ความคิดเห็น