Week 1 has been slow I have ran into more problems than I could have through. But I have set up a scene and terrain. I set up my third person controller even though I ran into some problems with Unity and my computer. I then painted my texture my scenes ground and hills and added some small details to the terrain. Then I painted grass and tress to make the scene seem like a jungle. Lastly I tried find an Ape model that I could use as my character that was pre-skinned, textured, and animated, but crazy enough there were no free models that meet my requirements so am changing my main character to a Tarzan like character. Hopefully week 2 has a few less bumps.
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For our finial project in AGAD we have to make an independent project game in Unity. As someone who grew up playing games like Ratchet and Clank, and Super Monkey Ball I wanted to make a game that combined the two sort of. The concept is that you are an baby ape who has fallen out of his families great tree and you have to be reunited with your family so you have to jump from platform to platform and climb vines to reach your home. Along the way you are also to pick up bananas as an extra level of game play. The game will be in third person similar to Ratchet and Clank because I loved that style of platforming puzzles also I haven't tried to add a third person controller to Unity.
ECGC is the East Coast Game Conference where members of the industry come together and talk and have informative talks about the game industry as a whole and how to get started or become a part of the industry and for indie game companies to show off games they are making and to highlight new technologies. ECGC was fun overall and had lots of good information about the game industry and meeting cool people who are a part of the industry like John Romero who worked on games like Quake and Doom. ECGC also opened up my eyes to the different types of people who work in the game industry both large and small and help give a scope of they types of work and amount of work is required to produce a game. ECGC had few downsides to it mainly being the majority of the talks that were available were of not much interest to me, but with the talks, I did go to I enjoyed thoroughly. "Selling Invisible Fun" was my favorite talk I went to and it discussed the ends and outs how to pitch your game to a company to help fund your ideas. I enjoy public speaking and persuading people to believe how I feel to back me what I like to do and this is why this talk interested me so much. The main takeaway points from the talk were that you need to have a good hook so you can make your game idea stand out from all the other game ideas and you need show why you and your team an able to do the job with the financial assistance of the publisher. Also knowing how to take problems that you might face in the development process and come forward with your concerns to show that you care about the project and want to do the best you can and not hide your problems, but while still heaving a strong idea that separates your idea for others. Before the talk I got to talk to the guy sitting next to me who was an indie developer himself who didn't look any older than a high school student and was very adamant about the game industry and how he wanted to be able to pitch this game idea that he and some friends were messing around within Unity. I enjoy all types of games both physical like sports and board games and digital like video games, but I don't feel like I would be a good fit in the game industry honestly I didn't really enjoy many of the types of people I was at ECGC and it those types of people who work in the Game industry I wouldn't work well with them and I don't want to be the person on a team that holds production back so most likely I will be trying to get another type of job involving computers because how much I love doing that stuff.
With having almost a month of Unity practice it is time to reflect on some of the most important aspects of Unity. First of all is the small changes from normal typing to code with ; having to be at the end of every line and the capitalization of coding being different from typing. Also how you have to us { } to make sure you call certain lines of codes in a function and if you want that function to refer to another function or variable you have write the name exactly as you wrote it when you called for it the first time so you don't miss reference. Also when to use Update verse FixedUpdate being
Unity has been hard over the past week and a half. I am not great at coding and my typing skills on the particular keyboard I use at school are not as great as my keyboarding skills at my home keyboard. Because of this it has taken me even longer to get simple tasks done to complete tutorials. This has been hard on the time restraint we have in class and the dead lines I have to meet. Also some keys on my keyboard I have found are sticky and need a little more presage than other keys for them to input their letter. This has be most apparent with my shift-key which is necessary for coding because of how often you have to capitalize certain letters and when you do capitalize isn't always apparent.
This week we have started using the Unity engine and have begun learning how to use the program by familiarizing ourselves with the tools and the UI. Learning the UI and its tools were not hard because of how well laid out the program. We also began learning how to code using C# (c sharp). This has been very hard for me because first of have all no experience coding in any language and I am not good a spelling so making sure everything I am typing in is correct has taken a fair amount of time for me. So far I haven't run into too many problems luckily only having small bumps with miss-spellings or misplacement of brackets. I do enjoy this game engine more than the Game Maker, the one we used last year because there is more I have to know than dragging and dropping little boxes to do the coding for me because of how important knowing how to code is to the world that we will be working in.
This upcoming week we will be starting Unity which is a 3D physics/game engine where hopefully we can make cool animations with it's physics engine and take those models and put them into it's game engine and make our first 3D games. It's cool to see our 3D skills come full circle because the 2D games we made last year we made little to no sprites for those games. Now with our 3D skills hopefully we will be able to make our own characters and bone, skin, and rig them and take them into unity. Hopefully I will be able to adapt to the new UI of Unity and learn the programming part of Unity because in past years that has been hard for students to learn because of how hard programming is.
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AuthorIm a student at Durham School of the Arts Highschool in Durham North Carolina . I love playing video games and enjoy useing digital artwork as a platform to display information more efficiently, I also enjoy industrial photography and camping. Archives
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