Well, I haven't posted in a bit, but I'm trying to keep it up. So here's an update to my indie game devlog! I still have yet to come up with a name for it, but I'll think of something soon enough. But! I have some new features that are going to be featured in this feature! (that's a lot of features). So stay tuned for some feats.
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Wow, I haven't posted in a while. Like a long while. Like a looooong while. Anyway, in the meantime I worked on a bunch of stuff. Learned a bunch. Realized I should probably update the blog if I want anyone to know what I'm doing then started here. Now, I built this neat environment for a planned boss fight, and camera stuffs is usually just fine, if the camera is doing basic player following. However, I need it to curve around on a track. I figured out how to make it do a simple follow, as well as follow on a track (picture like in behind-the-scenes movies when they have carts and tracks, that's in games too). The problem is transitioning from a simple follow to the dolly track, and it's frustrating and I've almost ripped my hair out of my head but I can do this.
My solution I think I can get pretty good. The jump cut is not what I want because it just doesn't flow well. The environment can be tweaked on later but right now I'm trying to get down mechanics and so I'm starting off with the basics. I think I need to set values for how much control one camera has over the other, then have a little script run through to the other smoothly. Like putting a ball in the middle of a teeter totter and balancing it back and forth. Cha till tomorrow. (I promise I'll make at least weekly blog posts now)
On the Unity asset store, there are many templates that I can buy to save me time on common mechanics. Like a third person controller or a inventory system. Now to save myself time in my game, I could buy one of those and probably trade money for time. However, if I do that I wouldn't be learning anything would I? Those asset's often say "so you don't have to reinvent the wheel" but how am I suppose to learn how the wheel works if I don't know how to reinvent it? That's a much simpler metaphor to a much more complicated game mechanic. This week I'm working on how to make a good third person controller, so without further ado...
Now that I had the basics of the camera working I needed to get my character moving. What I did was make a script that figured out when the player wanted to move, how they were moving and where they were moving. I made this little flow chart which had many functions in each step, but this shows the gist of it. I also add prayers to some of my scripts when I can, I'm a Christian but don't let that offend you. (bottom left) First it checks if the player is moving. Then it checks if they're wanting to run or walk. The green part is to prevent switching from running to walking (or vice versa) in mid air. Lastly, for the most basic third-person camera system that I made, I simply needed to integrate jumping. It was an entirely different script that ran at the same time as the movement one except it prevented double jumping and didn't change the way the player moved around the ground. (top right) After all that shenanigans, I could put it together to make my basic third person controller (see gif above). The player can now walk, run and jump! I'm planning much more complex actions in the future, but this is a good start for now. I'm super tired writing this and have to get to bed. For next week I'm going to try and implement a little more third person controls as well as well as maybe some interaction options. But until then, stay classy!
If you're here than that probably means you're interested enough to read this much. Now you may be thinking "what's this blog all about?" and I may be thinking "I honestly don't know." But I can tell you why this blog is all about (who needs English?). Which is, well I created this blog just so that I can motivate myself to keep developing and learning as I go through my game developing journey. I'm not all that good at introductions so I'll just dig into some stuff. This past week (or two) I decided to finally start trying to learn game development by just diving in. About 2 years ago I saw some Udemy ad and decided to get a course on Udemy. For those of you that don't know, Udemy is a platform (company? website? all of the above?) that has tons of online courses offered where people can purchase them to learn all sorts of things. Now I'm no marketing expert but they have a certain ploy that is kinda directed at new people where they try to make it seem as though everything on store is ON SALE NOW 99% OFF FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY EXPIRES IN 2 DAYS! What they don't mention is that the things that are on sale, well, are always on sale. The courses I bought were supposedly $200 while I bought them for $15 each (I got 2 courses) thinking that I had snatched this ever-so-amazing deal only to realize that they have that going on 24/7. They're not bad courses either, they were well worth the price. That is if I invested any time in them whatsoever. Which I didn't. I have hardly touched them ever since I bought them, probably only watched maybe an hour out of about 18 hours worth of good stuff to learn. But I simply couldn't get myself to keep doing assignments and the like, I just couldn't. I had to find another way to learn how to make games. And then something magical happened... Okay not really magical. But I figured my problem was that I was trying to do relearn a bunch of stuff I kinda knew, which was programming. I already know Python (not a snake I promise) and this course started by teaching C#, but all of the stuff the teacher went through just felt like I had already done it before just differently. On top of that there was nothing driving me to do things much because it's just a bunch of videos on a screen doing the little projects the people never like doing before they start working on their dream. So I figured I'd try something else. I already know how programming works, I've made games (from scratch even) before so I know where to start, so what do I do to get myself to start? (Well first, I forgot to mention that I'm using the game engine Unity. Very popular, back to where I was.) So I went to the Unity Asset Store which sells plenty of useful tools and assets, both of which I never know when they could come in handy. Since programming is time consuming and repetitive, I decided to give visual scripting a try. I've heard many games that have been made purely with visual scripting. Lo and behold, I bought the amazing tool that is Playmaker. Now here is where the magic started happening. Playmaker was so easy to get myself started that I'm surprised at what I started doing. All the Unity specific components were there and it was mostly just drag-and-drop from the get-go. My productivity went from zero to hero. I'm pretty sure in the past to weeks I have worked and learned stuff on Unity now almost every day. It's not that Playmaker is a lot easier than programming. It's just that now I feel like whatever target I'm looking to accomplish, I don't have to watch 3 or 4 boring (sorry Udemy) videos in order to learn what I want, I just mess around and search stuff up and get there eventually. So anyway, first week I learned a lot. Second week, I hit some roadblocks and learning and development slowed down a bit. This lead me to watching and researching a lot about how I can best prepared for whenever I initially release a game in the future, and I came across something about starting a game dev blog to get your game out there, and here I am. Hopefully I'll be able to build, complete and release the game that I have in mind which I haven't even began to talk about yet. But that's for another blog post. I guess this post ended up being a good introduction into how I got here. For next week, my schedule is to attempt to make posts on Fridays. If that doesn't work, then I guess time will tell. Stay classy! |
William EngelHi, I'm William and I'm a Game Developer with the classic vision of a game that's going to change the world. Categories
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