Getting to grips with Unity Game Engine - Bootcamp Reflections (Part 1)

It’s been brilliant learning unity game engine last week and I’m in awe of all the things it’s possible to make, especially in such a short space of time. After learning some of the basics, I’ve been really enjoying my first taste of environment design with creating a 3D island environment, and my mind has loved being transported to the exciting world of game design as I’ve created ideas and concepts for my own game, which I’ll be taking further this week in our two-day game jam.

The camera and gizmo functions in Unity certainly take a bit of getting used to. I’m 100% a console gamer rather than PC, so switching across to keyboard controls like camera function and using WASD was a bit alien to me at first. At one point to my slight horror, I couldn’t remember how to locate the gizmo for the camera and then zoomed out so much that I lost my island and I couldn’t seem to manually zoom back - the irony of of losing my desert island wasn't lost on me. Fortunately I located the Move to View function which located my island straight away. I had to reconfigure the alignment of the island, and then adjust the directional light before I could then adjust the lens flare settings, but it was worth the lesson of getting comfy with the camera navigation and controls. It was pretty satisfying to line up the sun with the lens flare too and I've used mine to make a nice subtle moon glow effect – nice! Whether I'll keep this skybox or change it to something a bit darker or not, well, we'll have to see!

By days two and three, I felt like I was getting the hang of the fundamental controls and after having a day learning the ropes constructing an island with a flat-topped volcano, I loved coming up with my own island design concept and then making it. I can now see why people say making games is like art and found I could spend ages tinkering with various paint textures and details. In part 2 of this blog towards the end of this week, I’ll share more about the design of my island, as it will make more sense when I start talking about my game design.

On day four and five we had the challenge of learning pro-builder to construct a small arena with a wall and door. This did feel a bit tricky compared to the first few days, and it did take me a bit of time to get used to functions like extrude. On day five we had a full session to create a building for our environments we had created, so I gave myself a challenge of making a round building. I’m grateful for the guidance by the two brilliant Graduate Teaching Assistants, Matthew and Jacob, who were super helpful and helped to give me some ideas on how I could construct my dome. After discussing some ideas, I settled on a torus shape to build up via a mixture of extrusion and scaling, so that the dome could have a sky light. Although I managed to successfully create the dome and skylight, I did run into a few problems during this process of creating the door and the first-person camera wouldn’t let me enter the door I’d made. After a bit of trial and error with the door creation and enlarging the size of the dome itself, unfortunately I still couldn’t quite manage to enable the first-person camera to enter the dome. It may be that the shape is a little too advanced for my skill level now, but I plan to explore the problem a little further this week to see if I can find a solution or not. As we need to create a building which can be entered by the player for our assignment, I decided to create a secondary, square building complete with stairs and other interior features for my island basecamp. Although it’s a shame the dome isn’t functioning currently how I’d like, I’m much happier with the basecamp area now and I think this has improved the appearance of this part of the island and made the basecamp area a bit more dynamic.

Towards the end of this week, I plan to share some more insights about my finished island as well as reveal my game design concept which all being well, I look forward to adding to my online portfolio with the digital artwork I’ve created to go with it. I’ve made a few changes throughout the design and creation process of the project and its given me a brilliant insight into making games, as well as experience of coming up with my own ideas for games.?This week, we're going to be spending some time looking at interactivity and scripting in games, and adding these types of features to our worlds, as well as the two day game jam at the end of the week. Should be good!

To be continued...