At the moment, I now feel as if my Unity Project is now in a place that I feel very comfortable with. It now has the basic in-game mechanics for a game. It has a “Terrain”, with an interesting Map for the Player to explore and move around on. The Player also has an objective and collect “Pages”, whilst avoiding any Enemy NPCs that are actively wandering around the Map and will chase the Player as soon as they come into sight. Additionally, the Unity Project also has its own set of “Menu” options, ranging from the “Start Menu”, “Pause Menu” and a “Restart “Menu”. For this playtest, I will be testing the Unity Project myself but also handing it to other students to test-play so that I get a better insight on how to improve. Every Player will have their own playstyle and should be able to pick up any bugs to the game that need to be fixed, changes that I won’t originally realise need to be made.
The week for my Unity Project, I decided that I would create a few “Menus” options for my Unity Game. These would consist of the following, a “Main Menu” for when I start the game up that’ll allow the Player to start the game or quit the game. A “Pause Menu” which’ll allow the Player to “pause” the game, then either “Resume” gameplay, “Restart” the game or “Exit” the game back to the “Main Menu”. And finally, a “Game Over” screen, which’ll give the Player the option to “Restart” the game or “Quit” the game and return to the “Main Menu”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1wMnE06PeU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raAkiG3H8WY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbZ9_C4-Qbo
So, the tutorials I ended up finding and then following were a mixture of tutorials done by Jimmy Vegas and Brackeys. Once I had looked through them, I then tried to implement them myself into my Unity Game. After following their videos and a few other videos, I ended up going ahead and created the following menus for my Unity Game.
This week, I figured it would help the Player if I created a “Mini-Map” of sorts. As the Map itself is rather large and there are many Enemy NPCs, and the “Pages” themselves aren’t exactly easy to find by themselves. After looking around YouTube, I decided to go back to Jimmy Vegas’ Youtube channel to see what they could offer and found the following videos;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-CN2DXqJjM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faXQQ5b6GEs
So, initially, I had a few problems with creating my Mini Map at first. One of the problems I found was that the tutorial was a bit out of date and a bit different then what I was following on screen. Another problem I had, was that the “Camera” was not working correctly, and I received nothing but a black screen. Additionally, the Mini Map itself would not follow the Player on screen.
Regardless, I managed to find out what the problem was by carefully re-watching the videos and looking at the comments for any helpful info that could help me, and sure enough I manage to get both the “Camera” to show the “Map” from a topside angle, but also get the “Mini Map” to follow the Player around and show them what is happening nearby on screen.
So, this week, I have been quite busy with my Ubiquitous Computing and Web-based Gaming Assignments. As such, I have gotten as much done as I would have liked. I have, however, managed to create a small system that enables that allows the Player to collect objects and records how many they have collected. I looked at a Youtube video by Jimmy Vegas for inspiration:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0lx90n0s-4
So, I began by creating new “Canvas” in Unity Engine. Then, I created a new object called “Text” and in the “Rect Transform”, I pressed “Alt-Shift” and then the “Top Left” option. Then in the “Pos X” and “Pos Y”, I entered “10” and “-10” respectively. Then I in the “Text Script”, I typed in “Pages 0/8” and in-game the Player will then have to collect 8 pages, which’ll then kill the enemy NPCs.
Additionally, I also changed the “Font Size” from “14” to “28” and then I set the “Horizontal Overflow” and “Vertical Overflow” options from “Truncate” to “Overflow”. I then changed the “Font Colour” to a greyish-white colour. After this, I then went into the “Script” folder and created a new C# Script, that I named “gameplayCanvas”. In the script, I then used the following coding:
In the “Canvas”, I then dragged the “Directional Light” onto it. After that, I also grabbed and dragged “Monster” onto the “Canvas”, and then changed the “Size” from “1” to “8” in reference to how many enemy NPCs will be wandering around the Map. I then set the total of “Pages” to “8” and dragged the “Text” to “Txt Pages”. Next, I now need to create the “Pages” themselves.
To do this, I went into “Game Object” and then “3D Object”, and then I selected the “Cube” object. For the first “Page”, I then changed the “Positions” for “X” to “-11.11”, “Y” to “0.67” and “Z” to “19.815” respectively. For the “Rotation”, I changed the “Y” to “180”. And finally, for the “Scales” I changed the “X” to “0.5”, “Y” to “0.6” and “Z” to “0.1” respectively. In the “Box Collider”, I then set the “Trigger” option and made the “Size” match the “Scale” I had set previously.
I then renamed the “Cube” to “lostPage” and then I gave it a “Add Tag” in the “Tag” settings. Then, I pressed “+” and then named it also “lostPage”. In the “Tag” settings, I then set it to “lostPage”. This’ll allow all of the tags to have the same function as each other and when the Player collects a page, the game will notify them as such. In the “Player” script, I also added the following.
