DEV Community: TimWatsonNZ

Unity Dev post 7

TimWatsonNZ — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 00:15:52 +0000

I'm still working away at the game, I knew games took a while but I'm surprised by how slow progress has been. Part of that is just me being lazy, I'm trying to do at least something everyday but have taken a few breaks recently.

I got made redundant at my job so that meant more time spent looking for work and doing interview practice but I also just hit a period of fatigue, perhaps its the changing seasons.

I did feel like I reached a sort of eureka moment where adding new menus and game objects felt easy. All of a sudden things clicked into place. However, then I tried adding other weapons and I got bogged down in issues and my architecture for that system now looks bad. I got stuck in issues of rotating bullets into the right place and having missiles that move correctly. As in rotating to their target, having the right amount of acceleration.

I think i'm over that hump but I'll likely need to re-work the weapon/bullet system. Also I don't think i'm using scripted objects correctly. I'm not getting the advertised benefits from them but maybe thats also due to the structure.

I'm now working through leetcode. I'm surprisingly bad at it, I have gone through periods of algorithm practice in the past so I thought I'd be ok.

Unity Blog #6

TimWatsonNZ — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 10:01:53 +0000

Took a bit of a break, I had got to the threshold of implementing upgrades and honestly felt intimidated by it. My mind spiraled off into aaall the different upgrades I could implement and then I got bogged down in how I would write them all.

Today I just got back to basics. I hooked up the experience thresholds triggering a level up menu to appear. Then created some buttons that would trigger an upgrade when clicked and then created some pretty dull +10% move speed upgrades along with the text.

It's all working now, very static and boring but this is just the first draft.

Next I'll work on some upgrades that affect the player's weapon. After that I'll look into adding different weapon types.

Unity Dev Blog #5

TimWatsonNZ — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 22:13:35 +0000

I took a break for 2 days after being stuck for 2 days on Menus. Menus and Scenes are definitely a weak point of mine and I've been avoiding them which has come back to bite me. I had created a Main menu and a GameOver menu, it took a while to work out how to load and unload them and then I got stuck on the GameOver menu not being interactable at all. I looked all over the internet and nothing helped.

After 2 days off the project I finally figured out the issue. The GameOver menu had 2 canvases, I assume one was blocking the other. Removing it has fixed the issue but I still have some wiring to do.

I think next project I'll start with the menus, they are a pain and not that fun.

I next want to work on on hit effects, death animations and upgrades - more fun stuff.

Unity Dev-blog 4

TimWatsonNZ — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 00:56:18 +0000

I'm currently working on wiring up all the menus and creating a proper game loop where if the player dies they can exit to menu or restart.

I always find this a bit tricky, there must be a generic pattern I can use, next game I'm thinking of wiring this up at the start. Although I'm using a game manager which is initiated in the menu to then setup objects like the player. This makes testing individual scenes awkward.

In the process I ran into a few bugs, like the player stopped moving due to some code which restricts its movement. The bounding box was 0 so the player could never move.

Once this is all done I can get back to the fun bits, doing this wiring feels clumsy and tricky.

I also was struggling with object collisions, I don't know if I can use rigidbody.addForce but turn off physical interactions. I don't want players and enemies to actually bounce off each other for instance.

In the next stint I'll try finish off all this menu code and start on code to upgrade the player.

Unity Dev #3

TimWatsonNZ — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 11:53:23 +0000

I'm still working away at the game.

I wired up the shooting plus weapon system, it took some time to get something working that didn't feel too clunky.

The next day I came back and for some reason the event system was throwing nulls. I couldn't work it out so I just wrote some custom event handling - the issue was with invoking events with parameters. It may have been that my Unity did and update and the code I wrote no longer worked.

After that I played around with the particle system to get an engine effect.

Today I added a simple health/damage system and started playing with an on-hit effect. I tried a coroutine where the hit object enlarges and shrinks again but it changed too slowly. I was using lerp so it may be better to use a different function like sin.

I might just go with a color-change effect instead.

I want to add enemy behaviour next and afterwards wire up a game loop.

Unity Dev blog #2

TimWatsonNZ — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 09:36:36 +0000

After my first lot of coding I was left with:

I tried using the render pipeline and volumes to add bloom. I realised with my super basic sprites that creating emission textures didn't really work but the volume bloom worked nicely.

I struggled a bit with the controls of the player, balancing acceleration and breaking, working out which way the player was pointing etc.

I then added some basic particle system for the stars. All very simple but satisfying nonetheless.

Today I started off restricting movement to the screen, wrapping around objects if they exited.

That done I started on player shooting. I haven't quite figured out an elegant way to arrange everything. A class holding information on a weapon itself, info on an individual projectile and the actual game object itself and how these interact with the player. Thats the current task. I've got some basic shooting but it needs tidy up.

After thats done I'll look into enemies, spawning them, them damaging the player and getting damaged themselves and their behaviour.

This project is so far much smoother than previous ones where I really didn't know how to structure things.

Unity dev blog #1

TimWatsonNZ — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 23:07:17 +0000

This blog is mainly just to keep me at my projects. I find writing about them helps keep my motivation up and its also nice looking back on work done.

I've played with game dev off and on over the years, one of my first large projects was a kind of space invaders clone done in Java without an engine. I never finished, I got more interested in the engine-making than the actual game.

After that I toyed around with various game-dev topics over the years like collision detection, space partitioning, rendering, path finding.

I started to learn Unity during the Covid lockdowns, it took a while to get the hang of how everything worked. I ran through several tutorials but it felt unintuitive and awkward. I made a basic top down shooter and a sort of anti-aircraft gun game before my interest waned.

I dabbled a little bit after, I tried making a card game and a civ-like game. The first one fizzled due to poor game-design, the second got snarled up by bad code-planning.

And then theres now. I made another terrible, top-down shooter. This was mainly just to orientate myself again and work out how to write a complete game loop. I've then dipped my toes into post processing and particles systems.

My plan is to create a series of games and spend about 10-15 hours on each. I'd like to explore different parts of unity and different genres.

The first is yet another top-down shooter but i'd like this one to be a bit more polished and complete then it's predecessors.