This year has been pretty okay. Not only is it my last year in high school, but it's also my last year of Game Design. In the beginning, I had a pretty basic grasp of the industry and the things that went into it, but I didn't really know much about the various careers associated with it, or the legal aspects tied to said careers. This all changed over the first quarter because of the units associated with both topics, and through those I learned a lot. The lesson that had the biggest impact on me as a game design student was the personal project unit. This is because it was entirely unstructured and left it up to you to utilize your skills and bring them together to create your own game. I liked this unit a lot because I feel it's indicative of working in not only the games industry, but industries such as graphic design and video editing. As much as I learned from the career practices unit, if I had to pick one to be removed from the course as a whole, that's the one I would choose. I feel like getting right into coding, modeling, and Unity would be extremely beneficial, especially for students (like me) who hadn't actually done any over the summer so they could get their muscle memory back on those programs, instead of letting their knowledge of them deteriorate with time. In order to better prepare students for a future in the game industry, the course can be improved in stressing the independent project more, and maybe even making it something that's started much earlier in the year. Having something big like that to work towards does something to a student's motivation, and as mentioned earlier it gives them experience with working with deadlines in the industry. Since I'm not going to be here for Advanced Studies, this year has helped me prepare mostly for college. From my "reliable" sources, I've been told that college is similar to how things work in here, more or less. You're given an assignment, as well as a deadline, and you're basically told to go wild. There's none of the hand-holding that's been so prevalent throughout high school. Instead, everything is left up to you. If you get something done great, and if you don't, oh well. Also, the fact that there's no powerlunch associated with this class helps to drive this point further. You don't really have anyone else to blame but yourself (and Unity) for the grade that you get in the class, which I think goes a long way in preparing students for the real world. Course Map for the Year
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Now that I'm almost done with the final project, I can say that it's actually been surprisingly straightforward. Originally, I planned to make a 3D endless runner game like Temple Run, but I soon realized that that would be too beyond the scope of my abilities, so instead, I decided to make a simple multiplayer checkers game instead. (I didn't go with chess only because I don't actually know how to play.) I've had a lot of tutorials that I've been following along with to help me in the process, while at the same time making sure not to just copy everything straight from them. Making original 3D assets is really, really difficult, so instead I decided to just use free bear pieces and checkerboard models that I found online. I'm about 90% done with it at this point, all I need to do is add some touches to make sure it doesn't crash after a certain number of moves.
I think I've narrowed down what kind of game I'm going to make for the final project. I think that I'll make a simple 3d endless runner similar to Temple Run, where the goal is to survive as long as possible and collect points while avoiding obstacles. I haven't decided on a particular theme or aesthetic yet, but I might do something futuristic, with the player character running across rooftops of an endless city, avoiding robots and other hazards. Due to my limited coding experience, I doubt that the game will end up being that complicated or have much variation in mechanics and scenery, but it'll probably still be of the same quality of something thrown onto the app store by a tiny one-person team. Tons of best sellers on the app store are exactly that, after all, so if I manage to finish the game, there's always the possibility of making it free to play with a ton of ads and putting it up there for anyone to download.
Some Potentially Useful Videos: Endless runner tutorial playlist Making infinite terrain Additional tutorial I can already tell that making my own game from scratch is going to be a pain. Even when I completely follow the tutorials, there's no guarantee that everything will actually work properly (as demonstrated by the space shooter and tank games not working even when I try and use the completed files), so I'm not sure how good my 3d game will actually be. If I actually manage to finish it, the game will probably be something extremely simple like 3d pac-man or q-bert or something similar, because anything more complicated than that is way beyond my abilities. I'm going to have to try and finish the rest of the tutorials at home, and hope that everything actually works on my computer even though it hasn't been on the school ones. Maybe there's some update that I don't know about that's preventing everything from working properly. I'll have to figure that out when I get to it.
Useful things UI Text Invisible Objects Rigidbody Help Working with Unity is a lot easier than I thought it would be. The coding part isn't even that difficult anymore thanks to the tutorials, and the only problems come from the version of unity that I'm using being different from the version used in the tutorials. At this rate I'd still say that there's only a 50% chance of me actually getting to the creating my own game, and an even smaller chance of that game actually being functional. Following along with tutorials is fine, but making something from scratch is a different thing entirely. This isn't like graphic design or writing where I would be totally comfortable with doing that, but I'll still try and get to that point regardless. Not having set deadlines for the assignments is probably the best thing to happen to me all year in this class. Now even if I have technical issues that prevent me from turning something in, I actually have time now to sort them out.
Useful Unity Things: How to use getcomponent Rigidbody properties for 2D UI Text Surprisingly, Unity is a lot easier to use than I remember it being. Maybe it's because of the new update, or maybe I was a lot better at using it than I remember, but it was surprisingly simple to just jump right back into it from where I left off almost half a year ago. Even coding, which I thought would be a massive pain, was really simple when I figured out how to use the GetComponent command for depreciated items. Something that I've found really helpful is that C Sharp seems to automatically map your movement buttons to WASD and the arrow keys without you having to manually set that up yourself, which I remember being difficult when I first tried to do it. There's always the possibility of course, that the feature was always in the program and I'm just remembering it wrong, which now that I think about it, is probably the case. The hardest thing for me right now would probably be trying to get my game physics to work properly, which is surprisingly a lot harder than it sounds. The tutorials have been really helpful when it comes to getting the basics back down, and I actually feel somewhat confident that I'll be able to make my own game after I complete all of them. The game isn't going to be overly complex of course, the last group project proved that doing something like that is beyond my capabilities as of right now, but at least it'll be functional. Hopefully. Maybe.
Some Useful Tutorials That Helped Me Out: C Sharp Coding MORE C Sharp Coding Because I Needed It Some New Features In Unity That Will Probably Be Useful At Some Point If we could switch from unity to UE4, I'd choose UE4 mainly for the blueprint option. Being able to quickly have the program code for you sounds like a godsend, especially since you could always go back and alter the code later, and since computers are less prone to making the simple mistakes that one would inevitably end up making while trying to code. Unity is nice, but the coding can get pretty frustrating pretty fast and an alternative would be very welcome.
After watching some of the videos on Unity, the biggest thing that i can see being a problem for me is the coding, mostly because I feel like I have awful luck and even though I'll do everything right and follow the tutorials to the letter, something unexpected within the program would end up screwing up everything. The thing that I'm most looking forward too would probably be playtesting while actually trying to program the game/
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