XianForce's Blog

I think it's important though to use something such as Unity. Although the thing I love most about game development is getting down and dirty with the technical aspects, I think Unity still deserves a bit of my time.

Since I began programming, I have not gone back and used anything that'd pre-built. In fact, the only portions of code that weren't my own were the code of the APIs I used (mostly just SDL). The problem with this, is that I've been coding tons of low level stuff. The problem with low level stuff, is you don't often 'see' the fruits of your labor. I can spend hours refactoring code, or adding in a new manager, but as far as the gamer is concerned, none of that exists. In this way, I have become burnt out, which is why I take frequent and long breaks. I think using something such as Unity will allow me to quickly piece things together, so that I can get a lot of fruit for a small amount of labor, which will balance out the technical aspect of lower level programming.

I showed Unity to my younger brother today, and he's learning to use it too. I think this can also be something my brother and I can use together to make simple prototypes to play together. So my hope is that my use of Unity will give me inspiration in my technical programming endeavors.

So, just a few things I want to point out in the screenshot of my Unity Scene. Firstly, I made a 'car'. I only used the textures that were in the assets provided by Unity. I am just slowly learning how things work in Unity. The car is composed of 5 objects: a cube, 3 cylinders, and a particle emitter. The cube is the body, 2 cylinders are used for wheels, another cylinder is used as the exhaust pipe, and the partile emitter emits steam from the exhaust pipe. I packaged all this up into a prefab and put 2 of them in the scene.

Next, you see all those blocks on the ground? Those are 'bullets' I made a small script and attached it to the main camera (which is part of the First Person Controller prefab), and it creates a bullet and adds a force to it when you click.

The random staircase thing in the background is just something I used for testing platforming...

Besides those, the only other thing in my scene is a textured plane (as the ground), and a spot light source.

So I learned quite a bit about Unity today :D. I'll be gone for the rest of the weekend, and school resumes Monday, so I don't know how well I'll be able to keep up with programming. This year I toned down my schedule a lot, so I should have a lot more free time.

With that, I bid you ado :p