Summary
I started learning Game Development a while back. It must be years by now, but I never took it very seriously. Now, however, as I see how games can boost my creativity in both art and writing, I decided to put more effort into it. Well, that and the fact that it would be a heavenly gift to be able to make something with my husband!
I’ve done most of my learning by completing Udemy courses, and am currently in the process of going through Code Monkey’s Visual Scripting course. Before that, I completed the C# 2D game-making course. I can confidently say that I already have a basic grasp of the terminology, language, and other things related to making games!
All this learning I do is preparing me to start my very first true project in the future. But before that, I have some more things to go through, so bear with me while I stumble through this thick jungle. Whoa boy, there are so many things I have never even thought about!
Baby Steps in the Unknown
Some years back I tried following Brackeys in one of his basic 2D platforming guides. Well, I gave up because of the darned Parallaxing breaking my game to the point of no return. You must remember though, that I was but a baby, with the patience of one. So when I saw my character being magically magnetized to the center of the scene while the world around him pulled apart… well, that kind of demonic stuff would scare off anyone!
All this is to say that my chosen engine, Unity, has been an enigma for me for quite a while. It’s not that it’s hard to grasp, necessarily. It’s just that the blasted thing has so much in it that just the basics took me ages! To this day I make mistakes with Game Object Layers and Parent Objects and Children. Just the other day, when I was making the Enemy AI for the RPG I’m learning, the Enemy kept chasing some invisible ghost. Took me a while to find out that I had made the Patrol Point a child of the Enemy and so… Well… In Scene View the red dot was running for its life while the Enemy chased it down eternally.
Thankfully, for the more logical problems, I have my CodeGod of a husband to help me. It’s often amusing for him to see me wonder why the Spawner is spawning one round normally and the rest doubles. Only to figure out that my For Loop was connected to the body of the one before it… Thus calling my Enemy2 from the looped Enemy 1s… Anyway. I’m learning, that’s the main point!
Keeping organized
Whoa boy. Nobody deemed fit to tell this girl that making games means numerous scripts and objects and materials and… My G-d there’s a lot! And I’m just a beginner, doing beginner things! I don’t dare think what bigger games look like. But then I take a glimpse at my husband’s work and see… Thousands… and Thousands of lines of code. He was actually just showcasing to me how one of his things has over 90k words. As a writer, I was destroyed. Since, you know, I’ve yet to publish my first book even. Ahem, moving on!
The thing about having all these Scripts and Game Objects is that sooner or later, you will need to learn to name things appropriately and organize them into their own neat files and hierarchies. Thankfully, Unity is amazing at allowing for Game Objects to be used as containers for other objects. On the other hand, the Scripts, Materials, Shaders, Prefabs… Assets… You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? Slowly, I will cultivate a sense of order in this chaotic self. That’s the only way!
What’s next?
As mentioned before, my current task is to finish the course by Code Monkey. I’m over halfway, so I hope that with a bit more time it will be done. I still have ways to go with the Action RPG portion, as I just finished the lecture on Keys and Doors, and am now moving on to Dungeons. In some hours, it will be polish and juicing time!
The last section, after the RPG, is an FPS game. It says it’s ‘advanced Visual Scripting’, so I can’t wait to see that! But for now, it’s one baby step at a time for this little one. That said, see you in the next DevLog!