Final Project Indy Game Journey #5

Towering Vertical Slice Title Screen

This week we worked on completing the rest of our verticle slice. A vertcle slice is a small section of our game completed in two weeks so that our professors can gage where we will be at in development in two months based on our performance her. I was assigned the task of completing the primary weapon for our game and the bullet. I researched for a bit of time and came up with a pretty nice tutorial about how to create a machine gun in first person view. This was not what we had intended, but I completed the tutorial because the weapon was exactly what we wanted. I then took the time to pick apart the code and add it to our 2.5D view. This lead to a few bugs that took me some time to work through, but I ended up coming through and working them out. Unfortunately, the team decided to not add this work to the vertical slice and save it for our alpha build.

I then decided that until I got word if anyone else would need help that I would research how to edit our new machine gun and make it shoot like a shotgun. I found a few answers on the Unity forums and I saved them for work next week. I also found that I will need to do an inventory so that the player could pick up the shotgun from fallen enemies. I will also need to get the enemies to shoot or hand the shotgun off to whoever works on the AI.

I shortly got some word that there was some bugs with the player token a team member had imported and I had tried my best to work out the bugs with her. I informed them that the model imported may not be allowing us to get the functionality we wanted, so we ended up scrapping that model and moved onto new methods. I then had a chance to help another team member out with removing our stand-in skybox to replace it with the one we wanted for our mini-map.

I also got informed that a power-up still needed to be added to the vertical slice and coded, so I volunteered for that because of being done with my gun and assigned responsibilities for the week. I found a tutorial that walked through an activated bubble shield and I thought of editing that to meet our needs by adding it as another health that would revert back to the player’s health when the shield reached zero.

Our lead programmer Andy then informed me that there may be an easier way and pointed me in the general direction. I jumped into coding with some team members that are new to programming to help them learn a bit of coding. Unfortunately I got a bit lost with the way Andy thought of doing the shield and he ended up helping us out in a Skype conference. I was able to follow him step by step and I learned a lot of what I was doing wrong and the correct way to accomplish the shield with Andy’s goals in mind. We got a bit hung up before completing the bubble shield, pick-up, and random enemy drop code, needed to make the bubble shield live in-game, and I was back to researching out a collision bug we were having. Andy then figured out the bug and the team brought together all of the completed pieces of our vertical slice.

Below is a link to our vertical slice application download. Feel free to play it to get a sense of where the game is going and our progress after two weeks of development!

Vertical Slice Download

Next week I hope to code the shotgun and shotgun pick-up, get Perforce set to source manage Unity with our team, see my personal developed primary weapon added to the start of our alpha build. I have set a goal of completing my sections by Wednesday of this week so I can assist when needed without loosing time in my assigned development tasks.

On a side note, my website is finally under development! I will keep everyone updated through Twitter, Facebook, and here on my blog. I am always looking for talented people to work and network with. Feel free to follow this RSS and my Twitter feed, friend me on Facebook, and connect with me on LinkedIn!

Final Project Indy Game Journey #4

This week was a whirlwind on decision making, running with those decisions, and not looking back. We got to choose the Unity game engine as our development engine instead of the Unreal Development Kit. This opened up the opportunity to use C Sharp and or JavaScript instead of UnrealScript to code. Once we moved forward I jumped right into Unity and JavaScript tutorials. I chose to start with JavaScript tutorials because of the amount of help and sample code on the Unity forums and website. At the end of this week we had to have the foundation of a vertical slice completed. This vertical slice is a small sample of our game that will give our professors an idea of the time, effort, and abilities our team has to get this project to a gold build.

(Powered by Unity)

Since I was already introduced to Unity through my own research for potential jobs and internships, as well as a bit of experience from class, I felt pretty confident to move forward quickly. After a few hours of tutorials to brush up, I jumped head first into Unity and JavaScript and coding the sections of a vertical slice that is due this week. I started with trying to get a player token moving on the x and y axis, while locking movement on the z-axis. This is because of our 2.5D camera design. I was then informed that Andy Poquette had finished that, so I moved on to researching our camera and followed a 2D game tutorial that Andy had linked to our team.

After finishing the tutorial and seeing how a 2D game can be made in Unity, I reviewed the code Andy had put together that made our first week nearly complete. The only issue he was having was with our enemy moving in the z axis and the enemy shooting from odd locations. I researched the movement and shooting issues and came up with a few solutions. This is where I talked it over with Andy and he helped clear some things up with me.

After my coding, research, and tutorials, I turned my attention to our backlog and getting what I believed needed written with Kelly, Kyle, and Ed. I mentioned everything I thought was needed and decided to help out with better breaking down the programming sections of our backlog. The backlog will show us everything we need to accomplish and our timetable to complete each. We also are using a version management system outside of Unity called Perforce, but Andy Poquette and I are buying the pro version of Unity so we can use the integrated version management system as well.

(Week 1 Towering Verticle Slice Progress)

After this week, I am getting a good understanding of JavaScript, C Sharp, and Unity. I am feeling a lot more confident about success next week and look forward to the work. Next week I will be further programming and getting specific programming role so that Andy, Ed, and myself do not step on each other's toes and complete code while another is working on it. This is something that happened this week. I am pretty sure I will be coding the weapons and deployable, but that can change after our Monday team meeting. We will have a playable vertical slice for all you readers to download and play!

On a side note, my website is finally under development! I will keep everyone updated through Twitter, Facebook, and here on my blog. I am always looking for talented people to work and network with. Feel free to follow this RSS and my Twitter feed, friend me on Facebook, and connect with me on LinkedIn!