everysoorphan

[everysoorphan]

Three weeks in!

aye, we’re three weeks into learning how to do things!  i’ve logged about 15-20 hours into development in a couple of areas this week.  I usually don’t “clock in” while i’m working in blender which is where the exact hour count gets a bit muddy.  So last week I was working on setting up a simple gather 5 pickups kind of game and I did a little bit of work on that this week as well.  I switched over from using a Rigidbody to using a CharacterController which is having a weird result.  My Rigidbody kept doing weird things where it would meet the tiniest difference in elevation and it would launch itself like 50ft in the air.  Admittedly, I spent a good while goofing around with this because it was cracking me up and even donated like 5 minutes into setting up a ragdoll effect until I realized I didn’t have all of the necessary bones in my rig.  Anyways, switching over to the CharacterController solved my rocketeer issues and the movement is really nice.  It definitely clips thru objects more than a Rigidbody did but a lot of that is due to the weird character I made coupled with a sliiiiightly smaller box collider.  I honestly like the movement I’m getting with the CharacterController more than anything i’ve had so far.  Gravity seems to be a lot more normal than I ever could get after normalizing my movement and a Rigidbody.  That may be because I haven’t normalized my movement on this yet, meaning I still move faster on diagonals than I do on the vertical and horizontal planes.  Back to the work though, I’ve added the 5 pickup items into the map and that was really fun.  I used a 3D sphere and added some particle effects to it to make it a little more obvious and placed them around me 3 tiered little map.  Then I added a bit to my script so that the “game” keeps track of your pickup count in the background and once you have collected all 5, a sweet glowing cube appears in the middle of the top tier.  When you collide with the glowing sphere, the level just resets.  It’s no ground breaking reinvention of the wheel or anything, but it works... mostly.  I’m getting a weird issue where when I press play, my character starts off horizontal now?  I’ve not seen this before and i’m sure there is a simple fix, but as soon as you hit the movement keys he fixes himself and moves normally.  

I think my goal at the end of last week was to get to that point and create a menu that would launch the game.  Instead, I had this idea for a really really really basic side scrolling level that I wanted to pursue.  It was basically a 2D game made with 3D planes and emitters in blender that made up a facade of buildings with windows cut out.  the buildings themselves were all a dark charcoal gray and then I had different colored emitters behind each building so that the light came thru the windows.  I had 7 different buildings in total that i copy pasted along three different rows.  Between all the rows, I threw in a large plane with a transparent material set to 50% black.  The end result is this really awesome sense of depth even tho the rows are quite close to each other.  The 2nd and 3rd rows I raised on the Y axis in Unity and it makes it look like this amazing sprawling city.  Unfortunately, my Macbook Pro that I’ve been doing all of this on is having NONE of that game.  I added a cube and a simplified horizontal movement script and I get a sweet like 5 frames a second.  Unity will barely stay open if I have everything set active.  I tried building it out with only one row of the buildings and I barely saw any improvement.  Since every building has its own emitter, I’m sure there are a lot of options to make the game more efficient.  I could probably disable shadows on the 2nd and 3rd row and also turn down the intensity of the emitters on them... but I think the best option would be to disable all objects until they are in front of the camera.  Downside to that, it’s wayyy beyond my ability at this point.  The level background is really cool and it came together really quickly.  More news of progress though!  I did manage to setup a simple one button menu screen where the button changes color when you hover over it and launches the game when you click on it.  With that little bit, this weeks goals were accomplished!  Little victories!  

Looking to next week, I’ll probably be focusing on the game that my computer can actually handle.  My goal is to have 2 more levels designed and at least one of the two built and playable.  I’d like to have each level require a different number of pickups to advance which will require I learn how to code that differently than I have it set up right now.  Beyond that, I’m thinking about looking for another blog site.  I really want to be including pics and snips of code in these updates, but it seems that tumblr makes you chose between text or images.  I’ll do some snooping around on google and see if I can find any other good alternatives.  Until then, have a great week and learn something new! 

[everysoorphan]

a week later!

So all week I’ve been working on getting my NPC character to speak to my player with pretty much no positive results haha.  I’ve managed to get text to pop up and say the basic “press E to talk” but I haven’t figured out how to call my UI and text animations when I actually hit E.  I’ve run thru about 3 - 5 youtube tutorials on the subject and each time I end up at the same place.  All of they systems set up... and I still can’t figure out how to call them correctly.  I’m not at all discouraged, and I knew that I’d get hung up on really basic things at first.  I think 100% of my problems are coming from my legendary lack of C# vocabulary so far and the only way I can add to it, is by continuing to run thru these tutorials.  I’ve only logged about 10 hours into practicing this week, but it’s been a weird week and I’m about to have a lot more free time to devote to figuring this shit OUT.  One thing I realized pretty hard this week is that it’s really easy to get hung up on something and then sink days into it, when really what I should have done is spend a day or two on it then move on to tutorials about something completely different.  Yeah it would be really cool if I could get this NPC to talk to me... but really it’s just one small component thats taking all of my time and I could be increasing that vocabulary on other small more do-able projects that will make my current problem easier to solve down the road.  lol basically, ran into a hitch and (to use a fun Rocket League term) I just rule 1′d it.  With all that being said, I found a promising new video by “TheSenpaiCode” on NPC interactions where he has them working almost exactly how I’d like them.  I’ll most likely give that a go tonight and see if we can make my dreams of talking to a bouncing snowman a reality.  The plan for the upcoming week???  I’m thinking about making a super simple start screen.  Thomas Brush has a bunch of great videos i’ve been watching and his start menu vid is only like 30 min long.  Granted it’ll take me 4 times that to follow along and adapt things as I go... but that seems like a reachable goal for the next week.  All i really need is 1 button that says “new game” as I don’t have any sort of save system implemented.  EZPZ right?  prolly not, but we’ll get there.  On the off chance that it does go smoothly, I may try and start a new project and get one level done for a simple game that I can share here.  Not a clue yet as to what that would be, but it’s a fun idea and i’m shooting for the stars!    I also really want to sit down and take a better look at this Tumblr situation.  It would be awesome to throw in these screenshots, but as of yet, I’ve not figured that out.  Anyways, if you’re as green to this game development stuff as I am, hit me up.  I wanna know how you’re going about learning all of this.  You can always find me on twitter @EverySoOrphan where almost 100% of my conversations are Rocket League related.  I’m sure next Sunday I’ll have a lot more progress to share, until then though, have a great week!

[everysoorphan]

Dipping my toes in

I should start this by saying I am completely new to game development and have never coded a thing before a couple of weeks ago.  I’ve always wanted to make a simple game but I’ve always told myself that coding would be way too hard.  Recently I’ve been watching a ton of YouTube videos about getting started making a game and found a really well done video titled “What I learned in 1000 hours of game development”.  It was an awesome look back at how far he’d come over the course of 1000 hours of practice.  Since I’m literally just starting, I thought it would be cool to track my own progress and see how much more capable I’ll be after spending that much time on different projects.  I’m nowhere near good enough to make any sort of tutorial material yet, but if you’re just starting out (like I am) I have a list of all the tools you’ll need to get started.  The best thing about all of them is that they’re completely free!

The main tool I’ve been using is Unity’s game engine.  It’s free to use for personal use which is 100% what I’ll be using it for until I’m proficient enough to make the paid version worth it.  Unity’s main site has a great list of official tutorials ranging from beginners like me to more advanced users that one day I hope to catch up with.  They’re all broken down into easy to follow chapters and the first few only take a couple of hours from start to finish.  I started with the Roll a Ball game and it 2D counterpart, the UFO game.  From there, I decided I would make a new project where I could try remaking what I’d learned from the tutorials and adding to them little by little.  Luckily for me, Unity has a huge community of developers that are out there sharing their knowledge on YouTube.  Any problem I came across had dozens of videos on YouTube ranging in complexity and they’re all worth watching and trying out.  One thing I’m learning quickly is that there are about a million ways to do anything, and only about 1,000 of those will be close to what you’re looking for.  Out of those 1,000 there are still probably dozens of ways to get your desired results.  It’s been super helpful following all the different YouTubers along and trying out all of the different ways to write basically the same thing.  

Another great tool I’ve been using is Blender for making more complex 3D models and animations.  Obviously nothing I’m doing is terribly complex, but Blender makes creating objects way simpler that anything you can do in Unity, and you can import your Bender files straight into Unity as well.  You may have to watch a tutorial or two to get going in Blender as it is a little bit complicated.  “Brackeys” on YouTube makes some amazing tutorials for Blender and Unity too!  I’m terrified of coding still so I tend to enjoy using Blender a little more than I do Unity.  I’m trying to tell myself not to get bogged down doing cosmetic things that aren’t terribly unfamiliar to me and focus more on learning the code and scripting side of things. 

Gimp is basically a free version of Photoshop that has some really powerful tools built in.  I use it a lot for making simple color maps or adding detail to my UV maps.  If you already have Photoshop then I wouldn’t bother with it, but it’s a great photo editing tool with plenty of features and a sweet sweet price of FREE.  

A couple other tools I found useful as a starting point was an app called SoloLearn on iOS.  I had tried a few similar apps where you can run thru lessons and modules on your phone and learn the very basics of coding in small doses.  SoloLearn was the best out of all of the ones I tried.  First, all of the lessons are completely free.  It does have a paid version which removes ads, but most if not all of the other required premium accounts to unlock or complete lessons.  Besides 100% of the content being free, it also has some fun stuff built in like challenge modes, a script sharing section where users can swap clever lines they’ve written, and it shows your friends and their progress.  

Lastly, I found a nice time clock app called Harvest that lets me punch a button and keep a timer running while I’m watching tutorials or working in Unity.  Completely optional and has nothing to do with actually designing a game, but I want to be able to track my progress over time.  Harvest is free to use for what I’m doing and it gives me charts and graphs of when I was most productive.  In a few months when I really start noticing some progress, it will be cool to look back and see how much time I spent bumbling around obvious solutions.

Finally, the list of links to EVERYTHING I’ve mentioned so far.

Unity - https://unity.com/

Blender - https://www.blender.org/

Gimp - https://www.gimp.org/

SoloLearn - https://www.sololearn.com/

Harvest - https://www.getharvest.com/

I’m sure I’ve missed a lot and I’m going to work on writing up a weekly summary of my “ah-HA” moments.  If you’re brand new like I am, I’m going to try and do some challenges to make things more interactive.  They may be as simple as “make the Unity Roll a Ball game and add your own flair” but I want to see what other people are doing.  Also, if you’re a coding wizard, thanks so much for even taking the time to read this, but try your damndest not to explain things or coach me through something until I’ve had that moment of understanding.  It’s not you, you’d just be wasting your time because I’m clueless at this point.  I would appreciate your experience if I get hung up on something for a few days and need to ask for help, because I know that most of you are way beyond what I’m capable of at this point.  The purpose of this blog isn’t necessarily to have a DevLog where I show off cool shit, or a where I look for help or even try to help others.  I wanted to be able to share my progress with other people that may have thought about testing the waters of game development out as well.  It’s been a lot of fun for me so far, and I’ve been doing everything on a Macbook Pro from 8 years ago.  If it can handle what I’m throwing at it so far, I’m sure your setup can too.  Harvest has me at just under 18 hours put in since I downloaded it earlier this week and in 18 hours I feel like I’ve made a lot of progress.  Try this stuff out if you’re thinking about it.  It’s really fun and there are a TON of resources out there to help you when you get stuck.  

-Orphan