Aloha!
Today marks the end of my first week working with GameDevHq’s program and the main bit of progression that was done this time was saving the project to the Github repository. Today was a short session, so I feel like a review of the week and my thoughts on the progress would be apt for today.
The 2D project that we were given to work on for this first week was a good onboarding exercise that covered much of the basics of programming in C# for Unity. Some of the content I was already familiar with due to working with Unity in the past but it was nice refresher for the material since I haven’t worked on a Unity project for the past few months. The subjects that were new to me were working with Git and programming audio logic for a game. These were both important skills that I feel helped round out my skillset. I also enjoyed the challenge structure of the lessons as some of the results helped me understand some more efficient ways to structure my code. One of the examples I can think of was how to handle applying multiple audio clips to an audio source within the script. The initial method of providing audio clips was to create an AudioSource component and then provide a single audio clip for it to play. However through some of the lessons I learned a few other methods to handle it such as providing the audio clip within the script instead of directly to the AudioSource component, this method was used for handling the audio for the player character. Another involved forgoing adding an AudioSource component within the Unity editor on the game object that the sound is involved with and instead simply creating it within the script and running the chosen audio clip there, which was done for the Power-up sound effects.
My previous experience working with Unity primarily involved logic programming for functions like player controls and interactions as well as animation controls. The section that acted as an introduction to the visual effects and post-processing was also useful as it was another field of development I had not had much experience working with. These functions are what let the developer tweak some of the visual effects such as color saturation and bloom of the scene. Applying the right color balance and visual effects can help set the tone for a scene so experimentation with this toolset is worthwhile for improving the presentation of the game. This also means you can push the values to extremes that might make the game hard to look at as shown below:
This means finding a good balance for the visual effects for your scene is important.
A few other useful bits of information were smaller tricks like a naming convention trick for variables where a “_” character is added to the start of variable names to make them more distinct from the names used for Functions and other objects. An example of this would be to name a variable “_testVariable” while the naming format for a function would be “TestFunction”.
Overall I feel that this was a very fruitful first week and I look forward picking continuing development next week to further develop the Space Shooter game as well as start on the next course subject. Until then, mahalo for following my journey through this program up to this point.
