Hallow Games

West Virginia video game development

Unity

Leading Unity Workshop Spring 2017

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I got to lead a Unity Workshop for the club again this semester.  I got feedback at the end of the previous workshop and worked most of that into improvements for this version.

As before, the library has been super supportive of the event and Unity was still on the Mac books from last semester.  I noticed that we had several people that didn’t install the engine before the workshop last time, so to help make sure everyone was on the same page and using the same version of Unity, I required the group to use the library Mac books, which solved that problem.

A huge challenge I had with the previous one as well was people working at different paces.  To help solve this more, once we walked through all the basic Unity controls, I told everyone that if I was going too slow they were welcome to work ahead on the downloaded PowerPoint.

It seemed to me like people worked together more on this one, when one person had a question, if they couldn’t ask me they could ask someone next to them or I had enough help from my fellow officers to help everyone with their questions.  I think everyone got something out of it just based on the positive conversation afterwards and the more positive feedback on our forms this time.  We also got more people working in Unity after the workshop either in the club’s Fixer Upper Jam or in the Unity Jam.

Image may contain: 4 people, people standing

Video Game Trivia Quiz App

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So over Christmas break, I looked back at my goals for 2016 and I saw that I had written to publish a game on the Android store.  As you may have seen in an earlier post, I worked through a course where I created a basic Elementary Math Test and published that to the app store.  After I made that, I felt that I knew enough to create a video game trivia app. It included basic trivia on famous game developers, consoles, industry firsts, and a mix of all those categories.

The game has been in an open beta since I posted that tweet.  I have gotten some feedback from the club, including in a feedback form that I created and shared which has really helped me out.  I’m hoping to address those changes and fix bugs soon to get it into a release state.

Links Here:

Game Description Page on Hallow Games site

Game Store Page on Google Play

Elementary Math Test App Launch

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Elementary Math Test is now available on Google Play for free!  It works on both phones and tablets above Android version 2.3.3!

Check it out on the Google Play Store by clicking the badge below:

Get it on Google Play

Google Play and the Google Play logo are trademarks of Google Inc.

Elementary Math Test – Unity Quiz Game

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This month, I have always wanted to make a quiz game in Unity and I was able to work through a simple online class that taught the basics of it.  It was just a simple math quiz, and I decided to post it on my itch.io just for fun, so if your interested have a go at it!  I exported it to web there.

The main reason I took it was because I wanted to make a basic quiz-type of app for Android and iOS that quized individual club members about the history of games and some of the famous developers in the industry.  I figured that would be a more fun way then hearing me talk about it (even though I touched on it a bit at several meetings this semester).

Game Link:

https://hallowgames.itch.io/elementary-math-test

Leading Unity Workshop

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Leading the Unity Workshop was probably one of the best things I did this semester.  The first ideas for this came in the Spring semester when it was discussed briefly among officers and the club.  Up to that point, we had a couple of tutorials on Unreal and Blender that we worked through at meetings, but an hour really wasn’t enough time to work through the basics of the engine and get comfortable with it.  I also had several people approach me and ask about how I learned about Unity, as I have mostly self taught myself through several books and online classes.

So one of the goals that was set early on for the club this semester was having the Unity workshop – and I also felt more comfortable doing it in the fall versus that spring after gaining more experience teaching that summer at iD Tech, which I have also covered here.

In the workshop, I covered the basic Unity Interface, creating and manipulating objects, and then we moved on to making a basic platformer and designing the levels.  Overall, I think it was a success but there were several things looking back on it that I could have probably done better.  One is that it is hard to keep a huge group on the same task, as everyone moves at different speeds.  I felt bad because I knew some people were going through it very quickly.  However, others had never programmed before in their lives and struggled with it.  We also had several technical hiccups out of my control and I had said to those attending the event to have it installed on your computer BEFORE coming to the workshop (if they chose to bring their own), but some still came and wanted to install it there, so they were all behind from the start.

In closing, I am very grateful to the WVU library (Beth Toren and Rodney Adlington especially) and them working with our club to install Unity on the Macbooks and testing it out and making sure everything was working before the day of the event.  Also the event would not have gone as smoothly as it did without the help from my assistants Destiny Dunn, Connor Haynes, and Ryan Kubik, who I had taught the workshop to several weeks prior as a trial run, and in return, they helped me teach the twenty students we had at the event.  Shout out to Ryan also for the poster design for the event.

Teaching Unity with iD Tech

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I really enjoyed my job this summer teaching Unity with iD Tech.  In this post, I want to showcase some of the games that my students made:

 

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None of the students that I had my first week had previously used Unity, so I wasn’t sure how their final projects were going to shape up but I think they did a fantastic job!  Futurace was your average racing game, that timed how fast you could drive around the course.  Hockey was just what the title suggests, except the player pushed the cube into the goal instead of an actual hockey puck.  Maze involved the player being spawned outside the maze and having to enter in search of the gold cube.  Infinite Accereleration had two levels, and the goal of the game was to control a ball with no brakes around a track at high speeds.  Scavenger Hunt involved the player given a list of objects and having to fly around a bedroom and collect them.  Space Invasion was based off the sample found on Unity’s website, with an added custom enemy class and boss.

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As I learned the curriculum better, I was able to explain the concepts better and I think this allowed my students to make more advanced games.  Maze was a parkour game where the player had to jump up walls and between cubes to reach the finish.  The Slideshow was a slide puzzle game, and the player could just a puzzle size between 3 by 3 up to 5 by 5.  Shoot the Red Cube involved a randomly spawning cube that the player had to shoot in a limited amout of time, which decreased until the player couldn’t shoot the target in time.  Pong is just like the original, except on a smaller playing field.  Infiltrate the Base was a 2-D adventure game that had seven levels and a final boss that was almost impossible to beat, who shoot laser beams at the player.  3D Maze was a simple maze game where the player had to search for an exit.  The Second Coming was a game where you flew your camera through a tunnel with increasing obstacles.

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I didn’t teach Unity again until the fifth week of camp.  Learny was a game where you controlled an exploding car and had to destroy all the attacking cubes and fly between platforms to beat the final boss, who was a giant cube you had to push into a hole.  FPS was a first person shooter that had increasing waves of enemies attacking the player.  Mages was a first person adventure where the player could just walk around and explore this expansive wilderness landscape.  Spicy Icy Truck Mayhem involved driving an ice cream truck and avoiding oncoming wiener cars and raining snowmen.  The Flash obviously involved the super fast hero running through different levels.  Sandbox combined a 0lot of the Unity tutorials and was a game where the player could play an fps mode, a car racing mode, and then a plane piloting mode, in whatever order they wished.  Magic Shooter was the start of an fps game, with its defining feature being the responsive health bars above all the enemies heads.