One Year of Unity Game Development!

this is a physics puzzle game I'm developing called siege engineer here is one year of game development progress in 2014 I released my first game trickshot sync it was made with a 2d mobile game engine called Corona SDK I had fun so kept making stuff eventually I wanted to work on a 3d game that could be run on PC which was something Corona couldn't offer so I started learning how to use another game engine that I'd been hearing a lot about unity the idea for my next game was a procedural universe sandbox complete with full-scale planets a building system and realistic chemistry based crafting with a scope that large the game would never be finished I spent about nine months on it and actually managed to create this low poly space simulator but it wasn't a game and I decided to stop working on the project anyway now I knew unity so I kept making games as it turned out unity was pretty amazing for 2d as well fast forward to little over a year ago and I was ready to start a new project for some reason I'd always wanted to make a game where you can build a trebuchet trebuchet Tsar medieval siege engines that can launch 90 kilogram projectiles over 300 meters well that was my starting point a game about trebuchet z' my first idea was a PvP game where you could build and upgrade your trebuchet then battle against other players then I thought of making more of a physics sandbox a type of thing I've always enjoyed playing around with there would be levels where you build siege engines to complete various tasks such as launching a projectile some distance destroying a castle wall or protecting a king this was enough for me to start building a prototype I wanted the building system to be really simple but still allow for a lot of freedom and what you could create so my idea was to have joints automatically form when two objects are overlapped this wouldn't work so well with a huge number of different shaped objects so I decided to make various length wood beams the main item that you build with and then have some other items that you can connect on top of them when done building you just press the play button to run the physics simulation early development of the game continued to focus on the building system here is the item inventory I added for each level you would be given different types of objects that you would have to use to complete each task I also wanted the items to have editable properties so I made a menu that would change based on the selected item the connections that were automatically created could also be modified or removed the whole system I was setting up turned out to be a little more complicated than I was anticipating instead of relying on long tutorials I wanted building to be super intuitive and easy to just start using but viewing it as a user some things didn't work as I would expect them to at least in these cases I could make the changes to fit the expected behavior but there are a lot of situations where I didn't know what should happen when you click and drag an object should everything connected to it move to or if a connection is removed how should the two remaining objects interact intuitive this is still something I'm working on here's the game at this point there are a few more items added like wheels these stone balls there's a spring and some destructible stone walls [Music] it's a lot of fun to play around with but it's not really a game yet because there's still no objective [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music] it seemed like having each level use one of five or more tasks would overcomplicate the game and could confuse players and some tasks didn't even make for very interesting levels anyway so I decided to make every level focus on just one causing destruction you would need to build something to destroy enough stone walls to pass each level something that I thought could make the game funnier was ragdolls my idea was to make a ragdoll foot soldier as an item you can use and then they could run and knock down walls and fight opposing ragdolls [Music] you for me creating art is probably the most difficult part of game development it's possible to hide bad code but you can't really hide bad graphics I normally stick with this simple vector graphic style where each piece of an object is made up of these distinct solid shapes one challenge with the graphics in this game specifically was dealing with resolution in the game you can zoom in to make smaller edits but even with high resolution uncompressed images you can still either see the pixels or this texture filtering effect which just doesn't look great because my art was in the spectrographic style I started looking into unity plugins that could import SVG files and I found that unity was actually working on this feature and had a preview package available so it imports SVG's made in a vector graphics program like illustrator and converts them into meshes that you can use in your scenes it just makes everything look so much cleaner [Music] I made the mistake of not designing and testing out lots of levels early in as development progressed as a result I found that there really isn't a huge variety of interesting things you can build to destroy structures the game needed some kind of change after lots of brainstorming and about a month break from the game I came up with this transport a guy to a goal not so original I know but it seems like it could allow for more diverse gameplay so I made the changes and implemented new features to support this new idea I added a chair for a ragdoll guy you could connect stuff to a goal a terrain system and I came up with a story for why this foot soldier guy is flinging himself around everywhere [Music] you currently the game is playable and I'm working on polishing it up enough to release some kind of demo this game has been super fun to work on but I did get tired of it at times and took breaks to work on other small projects and learn things outside unity still it's the longest I've worked on a single project and it was a lot of fun looking back and seeing the progress I've made over this past year [Music]

Channel: Sam Hogan

Views: 1,099,783

Rating: 4.9401178 out of 5

Keywords: Unity, Unity game dev, Unity game devlog, Gamedev, indie game devlog, game devblog, learning unity, Learning game development, Learning to make games, how to make games, making games unity, unity 6 months, unity 2d game, unity indie game progress, unity progress half a year, what 1 year of indie game progress looks like, Unity 1 year, 1 year of learning unity, Game Maker, Game Maker Game Dev, indie gamedev, learning game maker, unity progress, how i learned to make games

Id: N8vyoIMQQEs

Length: 10min 27sec (627 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 16 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/wcats]

So, so cool. I love the way the camera zooms out to give you the depth of distance the lil guy has to be launched