Studio 1 - Week 4 - Weekly Progress HH

By Harry Hughes

So once again this week I have spent a ton of time trying to figure out C# and how it applies to Unity. Unsatisfied with the amount of progress I could actually see, I made my second game for the semester, "Multiple Levels", thinking I would try and just "make" something rather than doing all this thinking and planning. 

'Multiple Levels' takes place over multiple levels (!) - the player has to collect some spinning coins (which are square shaped), avoid chaotically moving obstacles, and find their way to the lowest platform without falling off the edge. 

I sort of stole some code I had been looking at from tutorials. Firstly, the script for the coins rotating, then disappearing when colliding with the player. Then another for the final coin rotating and then playing a sound when colliding with the player. And finally a code for making the player stick to the moving platform as it moves back and forth.

Slowly I am starting to learn more and more about how these scripts all work and what it all means. In fact I am extremely proud to say I kind of figured out the script for the final coin on my own - the "Rotate" script in the images - well, I sort of knew how to make both functions work, but wasn't sure if it was possible to get them both into the same script. Anyway it works.

I also had a dalliance with some stairs made in ProBuilder, but I couldn't get the collider to work and so the player kept falling through them.... I will definitely come back to ProBuilder as I've heard so many people talk about it.

Before this I had spent several days bogged down in C# tutorials. I received a lot of feedback earlier in the week to persevere with learning this stuff even though I expressed boredom, anger and frustration. I am still bored, angry and frustrated, but am finding the occasional moment where something clicks extremely satisfying. So I will persevere even longer, but I just wish I had some idea of how long I should expect to feel totally clueless, and I hope it isn't "years".

I also haven't thought of a really good concept to tie the games together and create a fictional gamemaker. I am still feeling like by just making and doing, ideas will come, but I still haven't done any real brainstorming on the topic so I should do that. At least, for now, the games I've made- "Mystery House" and "Multiple Levels"- are really bare, and they could be padded out, and linked together with more superficial elements like audio and meshes....

Anyway, I'm unemployed right now, and living rent-free, and have been ordered by the government to stay home, so it's a great time to just stay inside and learn, and it's proving to be very interesting.