Hello there. Here is a recap of Days 41 & 42 of my 60 day challenge to become a Unity Game Developer!
The cinematography game is now complete!
Check it out :-)
Yesterday, Day 41, I worked on finishing the game by adding in the main menu and loading scene. Today, Day 42, I finished cleaning up some of the cutscenes and fixed some issues that came up while playtesting.
Here’s a breakdown of a couple of things that I worked on:
Main Menu:
Created the main menu by opening a new scene, creating ui elements for the start and quit buttons, background, as well as images for the fade in and title. Then from there a new C# script needed to be created to start the loading screen when the start button was clicked or quit the application if the quit button was clicked.
Loading Scene:
Since the game will likely take some time to start up a loading scene with a progress bar was also created to populate in between the main menu and when the game starts. Similar to the main menu, I first needed to open a new scene and create all of the UI elements needed.
In order to get the progress bar to work, first thing that needed to happen was to make sure that the image type was filled with a method type of horizontal and a fill origin of left. This is what creates the effect of watching the progress bar image load left to right.
To get the progress bar to fill in relation to the load time an AsyncOperation was created. This allows for the load scene to run while the game is loading.
From the docs:
The operation.progress returns an operation’s progress back as a float between 0 and 1 with 1 being complete. This is what makes it especially handy for creating the loading effect as the fill amount also uses the same float range.
I also did a ton of cleaning up and debugging
Main Menu Start Button Would Not Work:
- Had an issue where the start button on my main menu didn’t work. This was a problem covered in the tutorial as well however, even after doing the necessary changes I still had the same issue. The click was not triggering at all as the tester debug.log I placed into the function was calling. Eventually I added in another tester button to see if it would recognize the click, it didn’t at first but after a couple of small changes, I was able to finally get it to work. I ended up deleting the original start button and creating a new one from scratch which seemed to remedy the issue.
Cutscene Updates:
- Upon more extensive playtesting there were quite a few changes that I wanted to make so that things we a little smoother. As mentioned in previous posts, as fun as learning to use the virtual camera has been, it is by no means a strong suit of mine (yet 😏) so I wanted to go through and make it look a little nicer. I redid a couple angles, moved some things around, and am now much happier with things overall. It’s still not perfect but its definitely better.
Other things I worked on:
- Fixed skip button functionality.
- Fixed security camera animations.
- Got started on a new 2.5D game…well barely but happy to start.
Tomorrow my team will be starting our first group project in this internship and I cannot be more excited!! I am super pumped to test out my skills and to really build stuff from scratch. Letting my creativity flow both in the visual aspects of game building as well as the code is by far what I love the most about all of this. I expect it to be challenging but am very interested to see how much I will learn and grow from the experience. Also very much look forward to seeing how my code will mesh with others on my team in a joint codebase. Should be really interesting!
Can’t wait to keep you posted on how it goes. See you soon.
