How my school project leads to the first game I created

Ported from my previous blog: https://winsenjournal.blogspot.com/

I haven’t posted after the first few, maybe you thought I quit? Nope. I’m back and I think this one is gonna be long.

On May 7th 2018, I received a homework about unity. This project was the very first time I experienced creating something with unity. I gotta say I’ve never been more excited.

The task was to make a terrain using unity standard assets. Basically just create something that is explorable. We were also required to include:

1st/3rd person controllerMini mapSkyboxTrees(Extra points if we include other stuffs)

I didn’t waste any time and immediately started to play around with Unity. It was pretty confusing and intimidating at first, as I didn’t understand the interface at all, but that didn’t stop me.

I did some research (mostly from Youtube) and in a span of a few days, I have became familiar with Unity’s interface. I managed to create not so horrible terrain. There are some grass, trees, water, and rocks. The next thing I did was deciding whether to use 1st person or 3rd person controller. I've always been a fan of a 3rd person games so I figured why not try it out.

I don't have the skills for 3D modeling so I needed something to make my character model, that's when I found Adobe Fuse. It's a software that provides us the ability to create our custom 3D characters, very basic but I thought it would be enough for this one. I made a decent character as seen on my gallery and imported the model into Unity. I didn't know how to code yet, so I used Unity standard 3rd person controller and replace the model with mine and my character could finally move. Still, something wasn't quite right. When I tested the game, my character could move but the camera wasn't following him. I then tried to position the camera right behind my character and make my main camera a child to my character's object. The camera finally did follow my character around but it wasn't what I really wanted, but hey it's a school homework.

The next thing to add was a skybox. All I did for this one was searching for a free one in the Unity asset store. I found one with a nice blue sky, downloaded and applied it into my project. So right now, if you go to my gallery and take a look at the first picture in My School Homework section, you'll see where I'm at.

Although not related to the task I was given, I was curious on how game graphics are being improved. So I found a tutorial online where I learned how to apply "Post Processing". The next few pictures shown in the gallery are the results of tweaking some of the post processing settings.

At this point I started to get irritated by the camera. I wanted the camera to be able to move freely using the mouse. Again, as I didn't know how to code yet, I found some reference and managed to get the result I wanted. I also made a minimap, can be seen in the last picture.

I submitted this as my homework, and somehow I only got 85 from this effort. Maybe I just didn't quite understand the task given to me since it was in Chinese, I don't know..

Finished the homework, I felt like this was an opportunity to just continue this project and create a playable game. So I write some notes on how I want the game to be, like the objectives and the mechanism, etc. it can be viewed here.

I spent weeks making this game, and finally on May 29th 2018, I finished and release the game on gamejolt.com. Please visit my game page and try to play my game if you're interested : A Little Obstacle. There, you can read the description of the game, and take a look at some of the screenshots. It is definitely neither a perfect nor a fun game, but this game means so much to me because it is the very first game that I've ever made. you might also realize that I didn't use 3rd person character in this game. The reason was that I spent a lot of time to make a footstep audio system but never got it right, so I decided to switch it to a 1st person controller, since it's easier.

So that was the story and documentation on how I created my first game. 2 months from now will mark a year of me starting to use unity. I'm glad I decided to make this blog, otherwise I will never get organized and would have never remembered such memories. If somehow you visited and read my blog until this point, I thank you to stick with me through this. Expect more posts to come but for now, this will be the end of this post.

#Devlog #Games