Week 6: Return of the Space Shooter

Week six has been a week of great progress and I feel as though I have a greater understanding of Unity because of it. The advancements made in my projects this week include me finishing the fourth shot type for my space shooter and I added the random hazard spawner to the game. I added audio to the game as well as solving the problem I was having with the asteroids disappearing as soon as they spawned. This week was not without its more interesting problems however and one such example is that when I added the laser to the ship some very unexpected things happened. To be more specific the shots collided with one another and shot off into random directions and also backed up so that they were behind the ship. I did manage to solve this problem though and advanced through the tutorial at the desired pace.

Week 5: Shooters In SPACE!

This week was very interesting and productive as well as having a few mishaps along the way, but there was a tool that helped me out of all these jams. The forms on the Unity websites were my best friend this week because they helped me to declare variables that could be editable from the inspector as well as showing me how to tie the camera to the ball in my roll a ball project. In other news the class has continued working on the space shooter and we have made good progress but I finished a little before everyone else so I started playing around with they firing mechanism in the game and at the end of the day I would up with three different complete firing types as well as starting work on a fourth type. In working in this project however I did learn many things like the usefulness of commenting out code that doesn't work so that it can be edited or so that Unity won't complain when I try to run the game with compiler errors. All in all I had a very productive week my loyal reader.

Week 4: Two Steps Forward One Step Back

With week four drawing to a close I feel as though I have learned much this week. I have started on the journey of attempting to do the roll a ball project in Unity Script. Now I know that this may sound like a step backwards but allow me to elaborate. The first time we did roll a ball it was in C# and the code was spoon fed to us with little to no explanation as to what was going on, so I have decided to do roll a ball from scratch using Unity Script to get a better feel for the language. Already I have run into several problems and overcome them such as getting the ball to actually move as well as creating a public variable that holds the value of the speed the ball moves at. Aside from my personal endeavors however the class has set about doing the second tutorial realizing that the 2D Rouge project would be too advanced. I have gleaned several important bits of knowledge from the scripting that we have done with this and I have already applied these into my personal roll a ball project mostly on the movement aspect of the ball. I also plan to implement the bits of code that we have learned that track if two things are touching into the roll a ball game as well for various parts of the project because upon completion I plan to expand this into a full game. Until next week loyal reader!

Week 3: Going Rouge

This week my class began work on the 2D rouge-like tutorial. This one is near and dear to my heart seeing as it is being made in good old 8 bit graphics where the vast majority of my childhood gaming memories reside. All in all my class has spent about one and a half hours working on this so needless to say we haven't made a huge amount of progress but we have gotten the idle, attack and hit animations for all of the characters involved in the game. Hopefully since I have a study hall immediately after game design I can just power through some days and get a little extra work time in. As an aside from this however my class has been divided into the teams we will be in when we work on our large games. The game that I will be working on is a modification of the mechanics in the game Splendor so I hope that goes well. Until next week loyal reader!

Week 2: How To Get A Job

My name is Jesse Kachnycz and I am very bad at writing about myself. First off I think it would be best to mention is that I will procrastinate on things that I am not interested in, but if I am interested in something then I will pour my heart and soul into it. That being said I would be more comfortable with a secondary role and I am not comfortable being in charge of things I feel as though I wouldn't be able to reign in people if I needed to. My skills are all over the place because I know a little bit about all of the roles, though there are some that I would be much better at because I have a background in them. One of such skills is programming because I am already reasonably familiar with java and have a basic grasp of how most other types work so if I needed to figure out how it works I could quite easily. I am also not too bad at pixel art, but only that anything other than pixel art I'm not comfortable with but if needed I could do. I could also handle assets like the music which I've always had a good feel for. I could also be good at Q&A and testing because I love to see just how far things can be pushed improve upon their weaknesses. I'm also a very detailed and visual person so drawing up a diagram or explaining exactly what I'm thinking of isn't too hard for me. This also makes me good at expanding upon other people's ideas and giving them more substance. Well these are all of my strengths and weaknesses so I suppose this concludes my interview.

Week I: The Journey Gets Rolling

Well my first five hours of class time have proved quite productive so here's hoping that I can keep up that level of sheer productivity and my generally winning upbeat attitude. In all seriousness the Roll a Ball exercise was very informative about how Unity works. This introduced me from everything the lighting system to showing me how to create an object that can take input from the keyboard and translate that to movement in a 3D environment. Wow that sounds really nerdy when I say that out loud... well not out loud but you know what I mean, my loyal reader. But I digress, that was mildly off topic if not mildly comical. In addition to all of the code and player oriented bits that I learned this week I also learned proper organization of the objects, files and scripts. It never would have occurred to me to just make an empty object to hold all of the things of the same type that didn't serve any purpose except for organization. I would have thought that doing something like that would have made Unity angry at me, but I guess this just goes to show what this whole learning thing is all about; figuring out stuff you didn't know and doing useful stuff with it. Well this concludes week one, until next week.

Week 0: A New Class

Well this being the start of my blog I suppose some introductions are due. Firstly my name is Jesse. My last name isn't that important so don't ask. Those of you who are reading this either already know me or don't need to. Secondly this is a blog to catalog my weekly learning and accomplishments or the lack thereof, so if this isn't your kind of thing sorry, because it won't get much more interesting than this. If you are interested in that sort of thing or are just here to enjoy my witty commentary while simultaneously poking fun at myself, then by all means come along and join me on my journey through Unity 3D.