Game Creation/Design Catch All

Fredrik_S wrote:
Rykin wrote:

Ugh trying to get everything setup on my work PC since I have tons of downtime lately. Having to install Visual Studio since Unity no longer includes MonoDevelop on Windows and there isn't a simple binary installer for MonoDevelop so you have to install Visual Studio in order to download and build MonoDevelop (would like to use MonoDevelop so that the IDE is identical between Windows and Mac since I have a Mac at home).

MonoDevelop has been phased out for both mac and windows from unity. https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/01/05/discontinuing-support-for-monodevelop-unity-starting-in-unity-2018-1/

Yea saw that after I posted. It is a shame because Visual Studio drives me nuts with it's auto-formatting crap.

I think you can switch out Visual Studio for whatever coding editor you’d like to use. I have it on my list of things to do to explore how to do this. I’d like something sleeker, like Sublime Text.

EDIT: Oh, that was easier to find than I imagined. It takes some setup with a good number of steps, but nothing terribly complicated:

Using Sublime Text with Unity

Fredrik_S wrote:

Great work! Keep at it!

Thank you thank you! It feels like it's going to be a good course, and very helpful.

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

I think you can switch out Visual Studio for whatever coding editor you’d like to use. I have it on my list of things to do to explore how to do this. I’d like something sleeker, like Sublime Text.

EDIT: Oh, that was easier to find than I imagined. It takes some setup with a good number of steps, but nothing terribly complicated:

Using Sublime Text with Unity

I played with VS settings and got it to a point where it is being less annoying. The newline settings by default are terrible IMHO.

On section five of the Tetris course now that I have everything working.

Most excellent. I'd be interested to hear your impressions on the course. I'm really liking it.

Having said that, there are a good number of places where he does the action in the video then tells what he did, which usually means that I have to rewind to watch what he did. No biggie, but it happens enough that it gets a bit old.

I also wonder what it would be like to do the class without having had some experience with Unity. Sometimes I feel like he explains a simpler concept but assumes knowledge of a more complex concept. I'm fine so far, and he hasn't skipped over anything I didn't know already, but occasionally I want to say, "Hey, you should have explained that and not explained the thing you did explain."

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

I also wonder what it would be like to do the class without having had some experience with Unity. Sometimes I feel like he explains a simpler concept but assumes knowledge of a more complex concept. I'm fine so far, and he hasn't skipped over anything I didn't know already, but occasionally I want to say, "Hey, you should have explained that and not explained the thing you did explain."

This doesn't bode well for me. I've been writing code since like '82, but have never messed in Unity. If they skip basic Unity concepts in their courses, it will be testing my Google Fu.

-BEP

bepnewt wrote:
Godzilla Blitz wrote:

I also wonder what it would be like to do the class without having had some experience with Unity. Sometimes I feel like he explains a simpler concept but assumes knowledge of a more complex concept. I'm fine so far, and he hasn't skipped over anything I didn't know already, but occasionally I want to say, "Hey, you should have explained that and not explained the thing you did explain."

This doesn't bode well for me. I've been writing code since like '82, but have never messed in Unity. If they skip basic Unity concepts in their courses, it will be testing my Google Fu.

-BEP

The Tetris course does skip some things. The guy mentions that it's not meant for perfect beginners to Unity.

The 2D platformer course assumes nothing. If you do that one first, you'll be fine for the Tetris one.

Game Design Level Up Day 4

I worked for about 30 minutes on the UI in the Tetris clone this evening. The game is starting to look like a game. None of the buttons are functional yet, but it was a good refresher to go in and build these elements.

In particular, I hadn't used Layout Groups yet, and the example he used for the bottom left and bottom right panels helped me to understand how a Layout Group works and how it might be useful. Good stuff!

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/8UchyCJ.jpg)

How I envy you people and your IDEs! I decided on HTML for my game and even being moderately familiar with webdev, making game UIs in HTML is not much fun.

Today's results, making a grid of inventory icons:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/JhtC6DH.gif)

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

Most excellent. I'd be interested to hear your impressions on the course. I'm really liking it.

So far I think it is decent. There are a few things he does that I personally wouldn't do in a tutorial. Like when he sets things up as a Transform instead of a GameObject. Sure you can do it that way easier, but isn't the point to teach people. There are going to be times when you need to work with the full GameObject and not just the Transform. Also he moves a little fast at some points and there have been a few times he has done stuff without saying he did it (or maybe he talked about it and then talked about something else and then did it). But it does make stuff a bit harder to follow.

I did notice that I needed to download and open up his project at one point and let Unity upgrade it to help get the sprites to import correctly in the new version of Unity. There are some settings that it appears the old version did automatically that the new version doesn't. That seems to be one of the real issues with Unity is that they change stuff so frequently and they don't seem to bother worrying about keeping the behavior consistent from one version to the next. There is one developer I follow who has decided to stick with the old version because trying to build his projects with the new version breaks the physics.

Rykin wrote:

So far I think it is decent. There are a few things he does that I personally wouldn't do in a tutorial. Like when he sets things up as a Transform instead of a GameObject. Sure you can do it that way easier, but isn't the point to teach people. There are going to be times when you need to work with the full GameObject and not just the Transform. Also he moves a little fast at some points and there have been a few times he has done stuff without saying he did it (or maybe he talked about it and then talked about something else and then did it). But it does make stuff a bit harder to follow.

Totally agree with this. The Transform/Game Object reference is a perfect example of something where I feel like he should have explained better why he was doing it one way as opposed to the other, as he took time to explain much more basic Unity things.

And yes, his explanations and actions are sometimes out of sync, or he does stuff he doesn't talk about, or he talks about stuff he did three steps earlier. I feel like I have to pay attention to both the video and his speech, and they are sometimes doing two different things.

I'd also add that he's a "shower" rather than a "teacher". He is basically narrating what he does, which is fine, but there isn't real "instruction" or retrieval or activities, etc.

With all that said, I'm learning stuff and the stuff he's doing is perfect for my level, so I'm happy happy. Moving the needle!

I finished section 6 of the Tetris Tutorial today and while I was at it I added gamepad support so now I can move the pieces and rotate both left and right using an Xbox One controller. Also made it so that when the Game Over screen is up the Submit button will run the Restart() method via enter, return, or start on the Xbox One controller.

Also updated it to use SceneManager instead of the deprecated Application.LoadLevel. Which just requires adding "using UnityEngine.SceneManagement;" to the top of the GameController.cs and then changing the code in the Restart() method to "SceneManager.LoadScene(SceneManager.GetActiveScene().name);". That will clear a couple of warnings from the console when you run it if you are using a newer version of Unity.

Also made a few minor graphical changes.

The last thing I did was remove some of the default Packages that Unity is now including by Default. I removed Ads, Analytics, and In App Purchasing hoping that will speed up loading because as it is it takes multiple minutes for all that stuff to load on my work PC.

Wow, that was fast!

Game Design Level Up Day 5

I'm hoping to have more time over the weekend to make progress, but today I was able to spend 30 minutes or so moving forward on the Tetris clone. I got the background image in place and started making the various block shapes for the game.

I did get stuck in one point because my transform tool was set to the wrong type of setting. I needed to set it to Pivot to get things to function correctly. I'm not quite sure what the setting actually does or why it's there, but I've got things on the right setting.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/4uWtdLj.jpg)

Game Design Level Up Day 6

I built the seven shapes today and started working on the code to get them moving on the screen. So far so good. Still quite a bit to do, but getting some motion in a game is always rewarding!

Probably the most useful thing I learned today was some features of the color picker than I had no idea existed. It made coloring the various blocks super fast, and I can see myself using it a lot going forward.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/veo5ZlH.gif)

Heck yea! That is looking awesome. Well done!

Fredrik_S wrote:

Heck yea! That is looking awesome. Well done!

Thanks! I'm about 25% done, so still quite a ways to go. I've only built two platformers and a few 3D game demos so far. It's fun to see how versatile the engine can be.

Game Design Level Up Day 7

I almost broke my streak tonight. I was pretty tired after a long day of family stuff, and ready for bed. But I got myself in front of the computer and hacked away on the Tetris clone for about 45 minutes. As often happens with these things, the hardest part was starting. Once I got about 10 minutes into it, it was easy to keep going.

Nothing new visually to show for my effort. I spent my time working on the Spawner class (for spawning new pieces at the top of the board), but didn't get to the point where it's actually working yet. So all of the progress is under the hood stuff.

I also spent a bit of time troubleshooting a nagging issue with the connection between Unity and Visual Studio.

Congrats on your progress Godzilla Blitz!

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

Wow, that was fast!

Well like I said it has been very slow at work. Working tech support I am mainly paid to sit around until someone needs help so that gives me like 6 or so hours a day I can work on it if I want.

Game Design Level Up Day 8

Good progress today. The piece spawner is in place and randomly spawns pieces. The pieces move down the board, recognize the board boundaries, and stop at the bottom.

Still some issues going on, as the video shows, but that'll be next apparently.

robc wrote:

Congrats on your progress Godzilla Blitz!

Thanks! It's been a fun little project so far.

Rykin wrote:
Godzilla Blitz wrote:

Wow, that was fast!

Well like I said it has been very slow at work. Working tech support I am mainly paid to sit around until someone needs help so that gives me like 6 or so hours a day I can work on it if I want.

I want your job.

Finished section 9 today and this is becoming a very competent tetris game. Played for a while and realized that tetris is much harder when you don't know what the next piece is going to be.

What are you using to capture video Godzilla Blitz?

Rykin wrote:

Finished section 9 today and this is becoming a very competent tetris game. Played for a while and realized that tetris is much harder when you don't know what the next piece is going to be.

What are you using to capture video Godzilla Blitz?

Nice work, Rykin! I hope to finish Section 6 today, so you're quite a ways ahead of me.

I'm using Capto at the moment, on the Mac. I paid for the educational version ($20). It was one of the few Mac programs that I could find that allow you to capture the computer's audio in the recording. It's got a good workflow for producing video to YouTube.

I wish I had a faster way to produce gifs though. I feel like that's taking far too many steps.

Game Design Level Up Day 9

Frustrating day. I was tired when I was working on the unit and I kept getting interrupted to boot. I wrote three short functions, essentially one 5-minute video worth of the course, and then spent the next 20 minutes trying to get my error ridden code to compile. Lots of simple mistakes. I feel like normally it'd take me 10 minutes to do that section, but today it took 30.

Conceptually, too, I was having a bit of difficulty understanding the way he was using the storage grid, and so it took me a bit to sort out how things were working.

But in the end, I got pieces to recognize other pieces so they no longer overlap. So although I only made a little progress, I made some progress nonetheless. I'm hoping with a good night's sleep I'll be fresher at this tomorrow. In my experience, the second week is always the hardest in these sort of streak things, so I need to push through the next 5 days.

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

I wish I had a faster way to produce gifs though. I feel like that's taking far too many steps.

On mac I've been using a free app called Giphy Capture - easy UI to screen capture, limited editing (to change start/end points and add captions), and save to gif/mp4. There's also some kind of flow for uploading to giphy-the-site, but I just save a gif and drag it onto imgur.

No sound, but capturing system audio seems to be thorny on macs - the last time I had a setup working I had to install a special software output device ("soundflower"), and then every time I wanted to capture audio I had to change the OS settings to play through that device. Quite a pain.

Example gif, more tedious HTML game UI:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/TyfqS6Q.gif)

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

So although I only made a little progress, I made some progress nonetheless. I'm hoping with a good night's sleep I'll be fresher at this tomorrow.

Best advice I've ever heard in regards to game development, or anything at all really, is to do something, anything, every day. Even if it's just a tiny little something one day and a huge section the next. All those things add up and eventually you have a game. So, well done for pushing through and getting something done!

Built in to Mojave is pretty decent capturing and editing for video and screen (cmd+shft+5)
You can do shapes, arrows and text boxes on top of the capture. You can also capture full screen, or selectable region or window.

fenomas wrote:
Godzilla Blitz wrote:

I wish I had a faster way to produce gifs though. I feel like that's taking far too many steps.

On mac I've been using a free app called Giphy Capture - easy UI to screen capture, limited editing (to change start/end points and add captions), and save to gif/mp4. There's also some kind of flow for uploading to giphy-the-site, but I just save a gif and drag it onto imgur.

No sound, but capturing system audio seems to be thorny on macs - the last time I had a setup working I had to install a special software output device ("soundflower"), and then every time I wanted to capture audio I had to change the OS settings to play through that device. Quite a pain.

Example gif, more tedious HTML game UI:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/TyfqS6Q.gif)

Oh, nice, I'm going to check out Giphy Capture. That sounds perfect.

I actually got Capto because it was the smoothest workflow I could find that allowed capturing system audio. I've used Screencast-o-Matic previously.

And that's looking awesome with the HTML! Impressive stuff.

Fredrik_S wrote:
Godzilla Blitz wrote:

So although I only made a little progress, I made some progress nonetheless. I'm hoping with a good night's sleep I'll be fresher at this tomorrow.

Best advice I've ever heard in regards to game development, or anything at all really, is to do something, anything, every day. Even if it's just a tiny little something one day and a huge section the next. All those things add up and eventually you have a game. So, well done for pushing through and getting something done!

I totally agree with this. I actually have a wall calendar for marking off days for various streaks.

fangblackbone wrote:

Built in to Mojave is pretty decent capturing and editing for video and screen (cmd+shft+5)
You can do shapes, arrows and text boxes on top of the capture. You can also capture full screen, or selectable region or window.

Updating now, I'm going to check this out. I wonder if it captures system audio, or allows for gif export.

You have to download a plugin to get system audio. It will natively capture your mic though.
I don't know of a gif export but there is an easy app for that who's name escapes me...

fangblackbone wrote:

You have to download a plugin to get system audio. It will natively capture your mic though.
I don't know of a gif export but there is an easy app for that who's name escapes me...

That might be the gif app that fenomas mentioned? I'll download that if Mojave doesn't have that feature now.

Game Design Level Up Day 10

Today was better. I got an earlier start on things and had more energy. I was only able to spend 30 minutes on things, but I got player control done for moving pieces to the right. Things are coming together! Tomorrow I should have some more time.