Lately I’m seriously spendong like every free moment on Skullie_World: A Developer’s Journey. It’s grown enough to where I can get sick of one problem and go burn off steam by trying to tackle another. I’ve got an in game task list i started (eventually this would be separated out as its own standalone resource to be instantiated for each project), there are character movement scripts and ohysics to be hammered out, every decent game needs at least some amount of story to give the player a sense of why they’re playing, then there are the in game collectivles that ned to be thiught out, the additional animations i atill havent gotten to - seriously, I can jump from task to task pretty high freq right now without repeating a task twice in one day.
I’ve started out by slowly climbing up from zero. What is awesome to see is just how quickly momentum builds. There are still days though, where I work on it til 2 AM, and all i manage to do is break the things that were working the day before…starting out knowing nothing about Unity or game development, but having experience coding simulators professionally in LabVIEW meant there would be a lot of restructuring. A newb like me is going to have to wander and ramble and follow through on all sorts of flubious machinations, learning what doesnt work in order to find what does. Having some other sort if coding experience however, leaves me keenly aware of the value of solid modilarization and scalable structure, which you dont get in round one as a newb - and testructures almost always hurt.
For those who dont know, a restructure means taking something that may or may not be working, and rebuilding it to work in a completely different way. The original logic may be sound, but if it needs to be split out into prefabs or broken into separate modules etc, all your references and depndencies change. Think: rebuilding after a hurricane.
Anyway, the first few days it was like beating my head against a wall. I wanted to just quit, like if every, single thing I try to do is such an instant failure, if every task in Unity is THAT difficult to setup, why would anyone use this crap??? -but they do.
I took a break from developing my game and just played some other Unity based games to remind myself of the reward for perseverence. There are some really sick games that were made in Unity. So I tucked my tail, ran away, hid in a hidey-hole and played games with my free time instead of making them. After about a week, I was ready to try again. I came back, knowing, it can be done. It has been done. The learning curve is steep, but its not a ceiling. Bullheadedness would be my ally, and the courage to step into the unknown - because everything about the sprite handling and animation seemed WAY too difficult from where I was sitting.
Before setting out on this venture, I’m not sure how I thought game animation worked. I never even questioned it until I was trying to work out the logistics for myself…I can definitely say it is far more complex than I had assumed, but when you break it down it seems obvious that it would take what it takes.
You find (or in my case, create) a sprite sheet. I made little template sheets with evenly spaced dots so i could try to keep good size and spacing for each frame. I first would scan my hand drawn sheet and convert to png, then i use the following process to get the sheet into a clean digital format (its a pain in the ass, completely, but it works really well):
I used two different websites to process the cleaned up files, one converted my sprite sheet into a gif, and the other turned the gif into a proper sprite sheet and removed the background. With a prepared sprite sheet, i now had to face the beast: how do you create custom sprite slices in Unity 6.0? Although it is simple, the process is not abundantly clear at first.
I bring thr fully processed sprite sheets into my project assets and import as “multiple.” This tells Unity that there are multiple frames in a single image - and now you mist tell unity the corner coordinates for the rectangle that contains each individual frame so the animator can extract individual frames from the sheet. Next a new animation must be made, but you cant just make an animation in space, it must first be attached to an object with an animator component.
Finally, once the animation exists and is attached, you must use a combination of scripting and animation controller to determine how and when the renderer will process and display the animation
There are a LOT of scripts already.
Unity has all the tools needed to make a game, but includes no pre built complications. You won’t find a quick option for building a popup menu for example, as you would in RPG Maker MZ. You have sll the tools to make a popup, and it can be anything you want - but you have to be able to figure out how to do it, you dont just select it and move on. The high level of flexibility comes with the high learning curve of coming to know how.
All specific behaviors are managed via scripting, but Unity has a really cool feature: it allows you to build parameters into your C# code and have them accessible in the editor. This enables the developer to tune scripted behaviors without modifying the script, and it has been one of my favorite features of Unity.
I guess that’s it for today, I just wanted to send out something of substance before I go all Zarathustra and dip out into the mountains of Skullie_World for some journey of unknown duration. Until then, stay cool homies!
I will try to keep a running list of all devlog entries here
Thanks for checking out some more of my work! As always, I hope you enjoyed witnessing as much as I enjoyed creating!
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