60 days to become a game developer. Day 56.
By: Mar Mcrae
Tags: Challenge, Unity Game Development, Game Development, Gamedev Noob, Challenges And Growth

Hi. Today is Day 56 of my 60 day challenge to become a Unity Game Developer!

We got some news today that the state might not extend funding for our program past the end of this week. All of us interns were devastated. Although my challenge was for 60 days, as an Oahu resident we were under the impression our program was scheduled to run through the end of this month, maybe longer. I am hopeful that the state will recognize the tremendous value this program brings to our lives. If you’ve been following my and/or any of teammates’ journey, than you know how much this program means to all of us and how much we’ve grown thanks to GameDevHQ. It’s more than just building games and learning to code; it’s learning soft skills, it’s the energy, it’s the community, it’s the enthusiasm to be here and put in the work. If the program is cancelled prematurely it would be nothing short of tragic. Only time will tell. Just have to wait and pray on it.

The news definitely put a lot pressure on our team to make sure we push forward hard to make a great product. Here’s just a glimpse of what we got so far:

Not sure why I wasn’t moving my player here 😅 but check out the enemy animation!!

There was quite a bit that was done today.

Here’s some of what I worked on:

Credit Screen

Today I was in charge of creating the credit screen for our game. For this all I needed to do was create a new UI Image on the main menu canvas. From there I set the anchor presets so that they stretched out towards each side, set all points to 0 and decided to make the background black.

I wanted to keep it pretty simple and clean so I added in the logo as an image and set the alpha channel to 25 so that it was fading into the black background. Next I just added in all the text fields and voila!

Big ups to my teammate Ryan for his wonderful UI skills!!! The smooth transition between the background and the buttons were implemented by him. For the credits button I created I just had to record my button fade in on the timeline he created.

Health Update

Our game is really hard or as our marketing material will say, you’ll be delighted by it’s challenging game play 😏. The original rules of the game was to have the player’s health and weapon level determined by the number of powerups the player collects. If the player gets hit once, he has one life left but loses all his weapon levels…. kinda like Sonic with his rings. This is great in theory but whoever wrote the rules didn’t realize he (or she) was talking to a team of developers ready to go ham sammy on enemies, animations, lasers, the whole nine…. which has resulted in an army of enemies and a near impossible game to beat. Near. Impossible. But fun! So, instead of toning down the enemies too much what we decided was we would tweak the health/powerup system a bit and only make the weapon downgrade one level upon damage. We also decided to increase the player’s health by however many weapons the player has available to them. In this case it is 6. This helps to create a nice gradual decline down to 0 regardless of what weapon level you’re on as well as keeps in line with the original rules as the player’s health/weapons will still be reliant on powerups. Just as before the powerup will still fully restore health and bump the player’s weapon up a level when collected.

Here’s what the code looks like now:

Other things I worked on:

↠ Debugged Big enemy to fix issues with weapons and spawn point.

Challenges:

↠Really hoping that everything works out and me and my teammates can stay in the program. Not worrying about it is the challenge.

Tomorrow we should be all through or pretty close to polishing up this game and unveiling it to the world! Can’t wait to show you.

See you then.