Over the last few months I have been familiarizing myself with different aspects of the Unity game engine. Here’s a quick breakdown on some of the things I’ve created.
My most complete prototype out of all of these is a top-down river kayaking game called Down The River. If you haven’t already, I recommend you try it out for yourself. If you get stuck, read a bit further and try again.
The left and right keys map to turning left or right and forward simultaneously. So holding the key increases your paddle strength and forward speed but turns you off-center. The player has to learn to hold each key long enough, rather than simply tapping the keys quickly repeatedly. Players can keep a steady rhythm to go straight or vary the key presses to turn. It becomes a little QWOP-like, but manageable. Teaching players to hold the keys long enough proved difficult and required a couple of prompts. I added arrow key prompts and a ‘power’ meter to indicate a steady rhythm, but this may not have been enough. Beyond that, if I were to improve this I would track the length of player key presses in the early section of the game and prompt the user to hold each key + reach max power.
I entered my game into LOWREZJAM, which required a pixel art style – conveniently hiding my lack of art skills. It also focused on only a single mechanic, which felt great as soon as I first implemented it.
This latest prototype isn’t really a game in it’s current form, but it works well enough. It’s a roller coaster game for mobile phones, where you use your gyroscope to control the camera and roller coaster. If I bothered to complete this you would score points for tilting the coaster carriage into each corner and there would be other stars to shoot with your camera and collect along the way. It probably wouldn’t be a very challenging game for the player, but that may not be a bad thing considering how difficult my other prototypes were.
Actually, my first prototype was a short, one level 2D platformer game. My original aim was to create a parkour inspired platformer with a more ‘realistic’ approach to movement, where motion is preserved and you can’t direct your jump (much) while mid-air. I had wanted to include sliding, different grips and ‘tricks’ a-la Tony Hawks. However, after attempting to create some art it quickly became obvious that I wasn’t going to enjoy creating my own artwork when I’m a programmer and just how much work was involved in creating the art and animations.
So I cut down the scope to use free art online, which limited my characters abilities to a simple jump and wall grip. Although I used a Unity store asset for platforming and my game was very simple I still encountered a couple of bugs with the asset – the major one that the player can’t always jump on sloped platforms. In the end, I didn’t have much success with this prototype. The movement was way too fiddly and unforgiving. It’s relatively ingrained in players that they can turn around or slow down mid-jump, Mario style and breaking that rule just feels like the game is meaninglessly difficult.
My biggest takeaway from all of this is that scoping your prototype to a manageable size is HARD – and I have to carefully plan on each game how to make do with minimal art that either I create or find online. I managed this the best on Down The River, which was a significant improvement over the platformer I did previous to that.
I’m currently working on a larger project which I will talk about in later posts. You can stay tuned on Twitter and here for more updates.