My big goal for October is to complete a full game in Unity, with working tutorial, GUI, high scores, animations, particle effects, etc. Most games I have made have just been functional prototypes, so this will push me to refine all the elements I know into a complete package, and pick up a few new skills along the way You can track my progress on this and other game development projects this year in my stream on Twitch.tv.
In particular, I’m working on a game called Bunny Kiss. Two bunnies are on a 2D grid filled with numbers. A bunny can hop to another orthogonal space on the grid if the number at that space matches the number of unoccupied spaces the bunny would have to hop, including the target space itself, to get there. The two bunnies continue to hop around the grid until they arrive at the same location, upon which they kiss and you win the level. Here’s my current working demo of the game.
Much of the movement and grid layout for this game used skills I’m familiar with, but the 2D sprite animations are brand new. I wasn’t interested in pixel graphics but more fluid sprite movement, and found that Unity included a package called Anima2D specifically built for this type of animation. The demos looked pretty awesome, and I followed the Unity Tutorial directly to get up and running with rigging the skeleton to the sprite meshes. I followed my mantra of “Actually Try to do the Tutorial” and within an hour had the skills I needed to make my own bunny hop! One thing not mentioned in the tutorial was the DPI needed for making quality images, and it took me some time to realize that the preview window for playing games in Unity was my problem. Finally, with a 400 DPI sprite sheet, I created some nice hopping and idle animations for my bunny sprite.
As I continue development, I’ll keep my code updated in the Bunny Kiss Github Repo. I might miss a few milestones, but I’m seriously trying to check in the code as much as possible. This is something I stress to my students, but try as they might, they only seem to manage to commit once a day or so. I’m thinking I need some stronger rubrics and explicit rewards for making small, incremental commits for their projects, and we should find a place in our curriculum to focus explicitly on some Github practice.