I’ve finished the second lab project for the Walker Boys’ Unity course.
Name: Thomas de Goede, aka Lord Herman
Timeframe: Friday Feb 10 to Monday Feb 13.
Project Detail: A top-down space shooter game. The player has to shoot down as many asteroids as he can within the time limit, all the while avoiding being hit by the asteroids.
Software Used: Unity v3 as IDE, Notepad++ as script editor, FileZilla for uploading the final product.
Final Thoughts: This was an interesting project, and also a bit of a nostalgia trip for me as I loved games like Tyrian as a kid. Most of the build went pretty smooth – smoother, indeed, than the first project. The only issue I encountered was that I couldn’t get the solid blocks to block the player’s movement. I guess the Mario games will teach me how to do that properly.
Time Breakdown:
Research– 4h for watching the lab videos. This time I paused the videos a lot to look something up or to catch up with the coding.
Design – 1/2h. Same as last time. The On Your Own objectives were pretty straightforward, and I’d already figured out how to do them while I was working on the video tutorials.
Build – 5h. Like last time, I ended up spending a lot of time on one issue I couldn’t resolve. The rest of the build went relatively quickly, though.
Play Testing – 1h. I did more testing on this game than the last one. Maybe because this game was more interesting to play.
Additional Notes:
The player can move through the solid blocks. The instructions weren’t entirely clear about it, but I assumed they were supposed to block the player as well as the asteroids. I couldn’t get that to work properly, though, so I left it as it is now.
I did a few things that weren’t in the instructions. I added a powerup that gives the player an extra use of his shield (and set his initial number of shields to zero), and I gave the bullets a little trail effect. I also added some GUI elements, such as a level indicator, a indicator for the number of shields the player has, and some lines in the instructions explaining which powerups are which.
lordherman 