Big Game Project – Last Blog Post

The project is now over. There are plans to keep working on the game, but nothing is decided. I have learned a lot from making this game and I am proud of what we managed to accomplish in eight weeks. I worked a lot with audio which is something the education hasn’t covered at all and I think it turned out great considering the limited time I put into it. I also learned a lot more about Unity which seems […]

Big Game Project – Gotland Game Conference

The game was in pretty good shape to show at the Gotland Game Conference. We had a lot of of bug fixes and balancing to do in the last days, but we planned it all well enough that we never had to do any major crunching. During the conference, it turned out that we had one big bug left. It had to do with the tutorial and made it impossible to create more buildings if the player did one very […]

Big Game Project – Last Week

We’re on the last week of production but I think the game is in an okay state to showcase. I am implementing more sound effects and fixing bugs. Today I’ve fixed the building mode in which the player could place a new building anywhere, not considering other colliders. The actual bug was not that colliders weren’t checked, that was more a quick fix left from earlier to make sure that buildings could be built despite other problems with the collision […]

Big Game Project – Static Sound Player

I have continued making and implementing sound effects. Implementing them is tedious because every sound effect needs coding, and version control is annoying since changes to Unity prefabs can’t be merged and I have to change something in at least one C# file and one Unity prefab for every single sound I implement.
Anyway, all the structures for the audio are starting to come together and implementing a new sound doesn’t always create problems anymore. Today I’ve worked on another helpful […]

Big Game Project – Managing ambient sounds

Our game world consist of two areas different in mood. One is an island floating above the clouds and the other a dangerous jungle on the planet below. The island has a windy ambience and the jungle has recordings of a real jungle. Day and night is also important for gameplay, so I wanted different ambiences for those. It was difficult to find two wind recordings that were distinctively different enough, so I chose to always have the same for […]

Big Game Project – Sound Effect container script

I have been implementing some sound effects. Our playable characters, the settlers, contain a bunch of different sound effects and I had to invent a system for handling them. The things I had in mind:

Allow to later add more sound effects fairly easily in the editor
Adding several AudioClips for each sound
A simple way to get a random variation of a sound without dealing with the randomization where the sound is played from
The AudioSource components should be children of the settler […]

Big Game Project – Camera movement script

The camera in our game is meant to feel familiar to people who have played games in the Real Time Strategy genre before. It can be moved around by the player in three different ways:

With the keyboard: WASD and arrow keys
By moving the cursor to the screen edges
By holding the middle mouse button and dragging

There is also a zoom function that lets the player zoom in and out using the mouse wheel. This works by simply moving the camera forward […]

Big Game Project – First post

So it seems I never take time to update this blog except when mandatory; but when I do update, I actually really kinda like it.
Anyway, the course I’m taking now is called “Big Game Project” and the eponymous big game is a digital game with a production time of approximately 8 weeks. I’m in a group of six students and our game concept (which we started defining way before the course start) is a survival game inspired by the likes […]

Coding a main menu

This week has been a bit hectic. Lots to do and little time to do it. We’ve had some big features that feel absolutely necessary to implement for the final version of the game. One of those was a main menu from where the player can start the game and look at highscores, credits, and the control scheme. (And quit the application of course. This was a bit of a hassle to achieve, and the solution isn’t even very pretty. […]

Coding a main menu

This week has been a bit hectic. Lots to do and little time to do it. We’ve had some big features that feel absolutely necessary to implement for the final version of the game. One of those was a main menu from where the player can start the game and look at highscores, credits, and the control scheme. (And quit the application of course. This was a bit of a hassle to achieve, and the solution isn’t even very pretty. […]

Creating Colliders by Magic

So we realized that our wall colliders were too many to be efficient. Each wall segment the size of one tile had its own collider which was created by the tile itself at the time of its instantiation. Every wall instance knew what kind of wall segment it was (information that was also used for determining which texture to load), and shaped the collider accordingly. (We had some struggles here because the shape of certain wall segments called for a […]

Creating Colliders by Magic

So we realized that our wall colliders were too many to be efficient. Each wall segment the size of one tile had its own collider which was created by the tile itself at the time of its instantiation. Every wall instance knew what kind of wall segment it was (information that was also used for determining which texture to load), and shaped the collider accordingly. (We had some struggles here because the shape of certain wall segments called for a […]