Week 10, Day 3: The Prototype

Today I made the physical prototype for the game. Now I know that that doesn't sound like a whole lot, but trust me if you have to make a game from scratch it is a large amount of work. I made on just three hours 105 game cards and 20 different tourists. That's about it for today so see you next week!

Week 10, Day 2: Splendor Strikes Back

There were interesting developments on the project over the past day or so including a change to the game play that will hopefully not only differentiate this game more from Splendor but also to give more of a space exploration feel. The main change from Splendor was to have six cards in each row rather than four and to turn face down the row two and three cards. The way that the row two and three cards were turned face up was if the card directly in front of it was purchased. Additionally players couldn't purchase cards from rows beyond what they had cards from. For example I could not have purchased a row two card without owning a row one card. Similarly I can;t buy a row three card without first having a row two card. Not only was that rule change made but also all of the re balanced cards were finished along with the design doc. I also organised the files within the game folder more and have started outlining a physical prototype. Till next class loyal reader!

Week 9, Day 1: Let the Splendor Commence!

This has been a very busy day one so let the enormous wall of text commence! But first I suppose that I should address the game that I am working on. The game that my team of two shall be developing a digital version of Splendor. My partner's blog can be found here. Please by all means go there if you wish to view the game's progress from his side of things because I will only be tracking what I have done each day. So without further delay lets get onto my progress for today. In just one day I have made a fair amount of progress with directing my art director towards the general feel of the game that I want it to go for as well as getting some quality rough concept art done. We collaborated on the starting point for the art and I am very confident in his ability to take that and run with it while I work out some of the finer points of the game. Aside from that I have started to build some structure for organizing the assets of the game and started to block out some rough ideas for expansions upon the mechanics. Along with that I also created the timetable for the week by week of what needs to be done so that everything can move along smoothly.

Week 8: Tutorial Over

What can I say after coming to the end of this process? Is the only thing I can say that I have learned how to use JavaScript? No for I have learned far more than just that. I was thrust into a world that I knew nothing about and I was forced to learn from others before me. I have spent hours pouring over forums and the Unity Script API just to learn how to do simple things that should have only taken a few minutes to code and after each of those experiences I came out with a new piece of knowledge that was not handed to me. Granted I had some help along the way from a few of my classmates and most importantly from my teacher but I found that bashing my head against the wall for a bit then finding the right answer just made it stuck all the more. Also during this time I have been free to explore the workings of Unity a bit more than my other classmates. In doing this I learned many lessons about this engine the hard way because for every one or two interesting failures that I had shared with others there were ten or so just downright confusing ones. For instance I had ships flying backwards, I've had to deal with lazers that bounced off of one another and I've crashed Unity several times now with more parts of code that I would care to mention. What I learned from these though was to isolate the problem. Checking individual things as I went along was the biggest help in developing my projects so that when things went wrong I knew what was causing it. All in all I feel as though I am ready to step into the many and varied splendors of creating my own game. Stay tuned this isn't the end oh no! There will be bi-daily updates on weekdays tracking my progress in developing the game so stick around to see me inexplicably happy, utterly confused and possibly hear me make vauge undirected threats about Unity as a whole. So stick around it's going to be one wild ride.

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!