Learning Game Development Week 11

Welcome to week 11!

At the end you can see my multiple ball power up being activated. I have that, a speed up the ball one, shoot bullets, and a longer paddle.

Bug Fixing

Most of the game went smoothly enough, but I did have a few bugs that came up that I wanted to talk about.

First, ball going outside of the screen. This was probably a problem for me only in my auto mode. I sped up the game play so much that sometimes the ball would skip right over my borders. In that circumstance, I decided to not throw the ball back in the game but rather just destroy it and send it to an end game state. I couldn’t reproduce the bug on normal speed so I figure it wasn’t going to be a problem.

Second, boring game loops. This is something they mentioned the course, but sometimes your game gets stuck in a game loop where the just bounces vertically but not horizontally, or there’s now enough velocity on the ball anymore. To break out of that, they suggested tweaking the velocity a bit on each bounce. For me, this didn’t quite solve my problem. Or at least not fast enough. I also didn’t like the idea of the ball just speeding up forever or having strange bounces. Ex: the ball could be bouncing to the left and then suddenly bounce back to the right for no reason. So instead I added another tweak where every time the ball touched the paddle, if the velocity was too slow on either the x or y coordinate, I would add additional force to the ball so that it would keep going in that direction. Similar solution, but just a slightly different approach.

Third, powerups added some weird dynamics at first that made my game buggy. The first one, multiple balls for whatever reason made it difficult to count effectively. In the course, they talk about creating a variable to keep track of how many bricks were created and destroyed. If that number got to 0, then the level was won. I tried doing that for the multiple balls, but sometimes it wouldn’t always keep track correctly. Instead, I decided to create an array of all active game ball objects and see when that became 0 instead. That fixed it for me. Another power up problem was my shooting bullets one. The bullets would launch and interact with the balls in the play space. I didn’t want that so I just created some new layers and made sure collisions from the ball space and bullet space didn’t interact.

The next project from the Unity course was the Laser Defender game.

This game was pretty similar to Brick Breaker actually. Replace a paddle with a space ship and replace bricks with enemy ships and the ball with bullets and you get the general idea.

Some of the things we did here though that were different were instead of putting on the enemies in the scene directly, we added them via scripts.

To do so, you just had to instantiate a game object in code by referencing a prefab. Also you can use, transform.parent to set the parent element of the ship to the position game object. That’s essentially what you see above. All of the enemy spaceships are spawned on game start.

I decided to add some powerups to my version as well. You can get a shield, faster bullets, and health boost. For the health bar, I used a slider (a trick I learned from another course). I’m really enjoying this course so far because many of the lessons start with challenges. Instead of coding along, they take the time to tell you to do something before they show you how. And of course you can skip stuff like that and just code along, but the course feels really well structured that the challenges are readily accessible. I also find myself tweaking things more to fit with things I’ve learned previously.

Gamebucket lets you keep games active for 30 days so eventually the link will go bad too.

I used to have a personal website but the fees kind of went up and I just didn’t use it that much so I ended up just cancelling it. But it did make me think about designing a new portfolio site for myself. So I’m spending some time doing some more specific C# things while also doing the Unity Course.

Fields and Properties

public string FirstName {get;set;}

It this scenario, it acts similarly as just having public string FirstName. The power in using properties though, is that you can change the default behavior when you get and set the property. For example, say you didn’t want to make it possible for someone to assign an empty string to FirstName. You could do something in your code to check every time, create a method, or use properties.

Constructors

Constructors help you build objects and assign default variables. So in our person example, we could do something like the following

And then create a new object by just typing “Person me = new Person(“Peter”, “Nguyen”).

Constructors should have the same name as the class, and you can create several different constructor methods that take different parameters. Imagine an age property that would be optional. If you had that information, you could have a constructor that assigned age, and another one that didn’t and C# would choose the correct method for your situation.

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