Making a game with code
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Over the last two weeks my group and i have been working on a shoot’em up game, or shmup for short. The theme of the game is hunted to hunter, in which you play a witch who goes from being hunted by the villagers to hunting them. My role for this game is one of the programmers and that means i build the skeleton on which the artists build the skin. And as any other builder one needs tools to build, and my tool of choice for this project is unity. Unity is a program for building games and is really easy to get into. As i have never used unity before i thought that it would be difficult to get into but i was pleasantly surprised of how easy it was. This in turn made my first major task for this game a lot easier. I was put in charge of creating the player character and to start with we made a list of all the functions and abilities that we wanted the player to have. On the top of that list was movement, because what would a shmup be without the ability to move. When our designer talked about what he envisioned for the player he wanted to give the feeling of flying a broom, as the character is a witch. This was the first challenge for me as a programmer working with a new program. After an of hour browsing the web i had found some things i could work with for getting the player to move. I used transform.Translate and gave it a direction, a speed and deltaTime, which i the time in seconds it took to complete the last frame. The script i produced made the player move by using the WASD keys, but it wasn’t the floaty movement our designer had envisioned. Back to the drawing board for me. After a couple of more hours online i found a new command, AddForce. This command, instead of moving the character like transform.Translate, gave the character a push in the direction of the button pressed. Up for W and left for A and so on. After also playing around with unity’s drag functions our player finally moved like it was on a broom.  |
