Side Questin — Day 2
Unity — Building Blocks
Working in Godot was a fun time, and I was glad I was able to dip my lil toesies with it on my tiny laptop too. I may revisit Godot in the future, especially since I just realized they’ve got some AR/VR capability that I’d like to get in to once I get a bit more familiar with this whole world of game dev.
But detour aside!
We made it to Unity!
Making our way through the lengthier than expected install process, I was left with a few tutorials built right into Unity Hub. In my head I thought I’d start with something like a 2D Platformer game but for some reason I ended up on a 3D Lego themed tutorial (probably because it was the first one on the list tbh).
I’m not sure if others have experience with Unity’s kind of built-in learning platform, but I mentioned before, I just wanted to jump into this instead of doing more research online of the best ‘tutorials’ or ‘courses’ to learn Unity.
I figure going straight to the source would be a solid bet so we’ll see if I regret this later. I’m open to suggestions if anyone’s open to share!
This tutorial is set up incredibly well!
As you can see in the picture above we see Unity in all it’s glory, but in addition to that, we have this dialogue box to the right. The dialogue box goes through small digestible bullets of instruction and focus is shifted away from the entire screen and placed on the instruction area and the relevant areas/buttons when necessary leaving no question how to proceed.
This lil lego microgame gives you the simple WASD controls to move your character around, use your mouse to control camera angles, and space to jump. You run around collecting boxes until you end up on a platform where you very quickly realize you’ve been played..
Spoiler alert
With no where else to go you jump off a cliff and die
Fret not my guy
For a split second I forgot that I wasn’t just playing a simple game, but going through a tutorial to make games.
MAKE
GAMES
Remember, because we have an active part in developing the game, we make the rules! Right now we’re just trying to make sure we know how! =D
The next steps we’re guided on how get through this level by increasing our movement speed, creating objects, and adjusting win conditions.
I won’t go through the entire tutorial here but there are a few other modules included in this course including the last step, “Build and Publish”.
Unity essentially builds a WebGL version of your project which allows you to share your game with anyone by sending a url for them to play in the browser! That’s how understand it anyways, I’m sure most people out there know better than I do about this so by all means correct me if I’m wrong!
̶U̶n̶f̶o̶r̶t̶u̶n̶a̶t̶e̶l̶y̶,̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶d̶i̶d̶n̶’̶t̶ ̶q̶u̶i̶t̶e̶ ̶w̶o̶r̶k̶ ̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶m̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶I̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶n̶’̶t̶ ̶a̶c̶t̶u̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶p̶u̶b̶l̶i̶s̶h̶
[Fast forward a few days] — So initially when I went through this tutorial, this step didn’t quote work out for me. I ran into a few errors that I don’t quite remember but it resulted in me not having a published microgame like the tutorial intended. After a google search or two nothing seemed super obvious to me as to what the issue was so I decided to step away for a bit and just come back to it later. Coming back, I’d intended on just making this post and describing my fail in the last step, but I guess not.
Before posting this I just decided I wanted to make a gif of the game play since I wouldn’t have a finished product and initially, the first gif above was just a picture of the losing screen. I had to make a few edits to the project itself like removing the bird (that’ll probably kill you the first couple times) and the middle platform, because I wanted to show how it was before I included those things so y’all could see what I saw starting out.
Well I guess that had something to do with the error I was having because after removing those (just for the playthrough) decide to go back to that last step just to give it a shot and it decides to work out. Weird thing though is I don’t think I saved the changes after removing those assets, so the final game still has those pieces I had removed to make the gif, but the build and publish step ended up working out…
Soooooo idk if that actually had anything to do with it, or if it’s because I may have rebooted my computer or restarted Unity since I last tried that ended up fixing it.
All that aside, I completed the tutorial.
This lego theme was a great setting for it too.
Negative side
I didn’t write a single line of code because the assets that had interactions tied to them were already pre made with the logic built in. I didn’t create a single asset myself, just loaded prefabs and it was drag and drop from there. There were more customizations I could have done but decided not to go too crazy with it so I can move on to the next step.
Positive side
I was able to just focus on familiarizing myself with this platform and I learned about placing and manipulating assets within the scene. I also learned how to navigate through the different areas of Unity such as the Hierarchy, Project file structure, and the Inspector. I imagine I’ll be fiddling in these areas a lot so I’m happy to get my reps in here.
I feel good about having finished this and having something to show for it. At the same time though, I know I didn’t do much.
It’s not “done” by any means, but it is cool to have something interactive to share with folks.
I’m not sure where I’ll be going from this point, but on to the next one!
Cheers homies!
