Unity RPG Tutorial #1 - Setting Up The Basics

hey everybody this is games plus James and welcome to a brand new unity tutorial series this series is going to be all about making an action RPG top-down 2d game and hopefully we're gonna have a little bit of fun making this and we're gonna learn the basic elements you bit need to get your own kind of RPG game go on and make something fun and entertaining for yourself so in this first episode we're just going to take a look at the basic setup of what we're going to be using in our project so I have a brand new our unity just started up here we're going to create a new project and we're going to make it a 2d projects because like I said it's going to be a top-down 2d RPG we need to pick our location so you pick - by going in there like that and selecting your folder and we need to name our project so we're going to call this and action RPG tutorial just to make it nice and easy to remember so that's the first thing we have to do and then all we have to do after that is just hit create project because we're not going to import any packages or anything like that from the game so it'll be it'll be just fine the way it is and once unity loads up we should be met with a scene just like this and you might have if you've been using different unity projects you might have different scenes set up but you might have set a different layout for your scenes but if you go to window up here and lay it and go to defaults as you can see that'll set everything up just like this we could go for another one if you wanted to to by tree or anything like that but for now we'll just stick with defaults and just for the sake of keeping things nice and simple and so what we're going to need we're going to need a few different folders so that everything will be nicely set up sort of as as we go onto the future everything will be nice and easy to remember so if we go in we're in our project folder here this is where you'll handle all your files and stuff like that and then in this big assets block we're going to right click here and go to the create folder so we're gonna click new folder and we're just going to call this this will be our scripts folder so that's where we're going to push look that's rips scripts so that'd be where we put all our our files actually sharp files as we create and write them and there'll be lots of files that we're going to create over the series but lots of straightforward things and we're going to keep things as simple as possible so if you if you don't have any experience with programming before we'll keep everything nice and simple and straightforward so that it's nice and easy to understand and we'll go from the basics upwards from there and so we'll also need to create another folder for M art files that we're going to use and we're going to create a folder for audio that we'll want to use at some point in the future and for now those are three basic categories that we can just stick with and just be fairly happy with so if you look in the description below this video there should be two links to two separate files that we're going to use and if I just open my folder here so these are two things that will be linked below there's a little character guy that I have here that I made just first to be able to use someone in our world and there's also a collection of tiles if we go into theater one once you download its roguelike pack and go into sprite sheets there's a collection of all this stuff that you can use for your ground and for different various objects say there's beds there's candles there's trees everything you could kind of all the basics you would need for certain RPG world and that that whole pack is made by Kenny who makes awesome free stuff like this that's free to download and free to use in your own game no matter what you you want to do it so what we're going to do is we have this folder here and we're in our sprite sheets folder as I said inside that pack and I mean if we could go back to unity if we double click on the add folder we go into there and I what we'll do is go back to our spreadsheet and just click and drag that in and that will automatically load it into the game first and we go back up to here and we'll drag click and drag in the character as well so now we have a character and we have all these sprites but if we were to put them into our game they'll just end up as a grid of four little dudes looking those all blurry and everything that's not what we wanted all so we need to set up the settings for these for both of these files so that they make sense so if we if we just double click on this guy and zoom back in if you count how many pixels across he is he's basically 16 pixels across and 16 pixels up so we know that each each square on this block is 16 by 16 so if we go back in here what we want to do is set our pixels per unit to 16 so then we'll know let's say if and we move a guy one space over so we'll then we know exactly one space is moving him over at 16 pixels kind of as he is here so then we'll know he's moved exactly one space over in our game world it's a handy way just to keep things consistent because the exact same thing is true with our rogue like I was I just click on this so I'm just gonna hit apply here and that applies it that applies the 16 to our guy if you open this up as well and we zoom in we can see on this thing as well it's also a that blocks kinda hard to see let's go for one day's you can see 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 and 16 so these blocks are 16 by 16 as well so it's important to keep these things consistent because you don't be mixing different sized pixels amounts so again on this one we want to go 16 pixels per units on that as well so then we know everything lines up nicely and solves very straightforward and we also want to on this filter mode here this is what makes the kind of look a little bit blurry when you have it unblocked bilinear so for pixel art and def put like what we're using of course this is unity you can use whatever kind of different act you want to use but what we were using here this project we want to set us the point I'm going to apply that and actually would since we just looked at the the character guys a second ago I'm sorry was all blurry if I apply this and drag it in here now first of all you see he's a lot bigger and if you look at the grid that is already laid out in unity now you can see that if we can just line up roughly one of these blocks is equal the same size of one of these guys so that's how we know that one one a full block here is equal to one full block of character but as you can see if we zoom in on this guy whole load the edges now are exactly solid so there's no more that kind of blur effect that we have so that's exactly what we want for our pixel character I am and then finally what we want to do here is set up these defaults so this this block is only 64 by 64 so we know no Mac size 2048 that's way too big so we can just go here and select 64 so that means it won't try and load up and take up too much memory that when you need it and then in formats we want to set it to true color because if you set it to say compressed it'll try and compress the image but when it's a pixel art you're gonna end up weird little blocks of color all over place that you don't want so we're gonna hit apply there and that'll be just fine I did the exact same thing on the spreadsheet so we go here hit 64 hit true color and yeah we said at the point already and apply that but like I said we drag him in and we've got a little grid of dudes that's not what we want we only want to be able to see one player on the screen at a time or else things get very very confusing for our players so what we do is go to sprite editor here oh wait no sorry first of all we have to go where it's a sprite mode up here at the moment it set a single so it treats all of these this whole thing is one big object but if we set it to multiple and hit apply and then go into sprite editor what we can do now is basically create a whole load of different sections if we can either click and drag and see we can click create all these little black different blocks and just as an example if we apply this and all those little blocks we just create is if we hit this little side arrow suddenly we have all these little strange things they look random and weird they're not what we want but what we know is if we go back to the sprite editor and just delete all these little bits what we know is that this guy is 6 by 16 so if we go to slice up here and the set of say an automatic will say grid by cell size so here we have an option for pixel size and as default is 64 by 64 but we're going to set it to is 16 by 16 tell it to slice and now you can see it's create a whole lot of boxes exactly around the edges of our character so we hit apply like this go into here and you can see we've got all these guys broken out into separate little images now so if we just drag him in there BAM now we've got our player in our game of course it doesn't do anything at the moment we haven't got anything going for him but that's ok and we can do the exact same thing on our rogue light sprite sheet but it's ever so slightly different so we want to set us in multiple as well hit apply and go into our sprite editor now oh wouldn't know I shouldn't have set this to be 64 because as you can see this is what happened that I said that's 3 64 it's trying to compress it all down into 64 what we should have done if we put this back on 2048 if we look at the dimensions on the side of the image is 968 by 526 and what you want to do is go for whatever is the longest side so 968 is longer side so we want to get the next number above that which will be 1024 hit apply and now when we go into our sprite editor again everything's back the way it should be just the way you want it to and so this is going to be slightly different than what we did with our player because net each tile is still 16 by 16 didn't mean to create - and I just referenced I should have said this and when we first got in here but if you can scroll in zoom out with your mouse wheel and if you right-click it'll drag this thing around which is very handy to use and so like I said these are all 16 by 16 but as you can see there's a little space between each one so obviously we want to allow for that we don't want it to just and take this split or to make blocks with a little bit of space around the edge and then I - so what we do is go to slice and and we have grid by cell size so we have our pixel sizes 16 by 16 and then what we want to do is say okay there's one little space around each one so that means there's a padding of one so on our padding here we'll say X is 1 and Y is 1 and now again we're going to hit slice and chop it all up and do the pieces hit slice but as you can see there's so many little things here that it can take a little while to chop up a big image like this so we're going to hit OK and I'm going to pop back in a second when this is all finished processing and you guys can obviously wait for this to process yourself and then I jump back to the video so see you in a second okay so once that's finished processing you'll see the little box up here in the corner disappear and all the little tiles will have a nice little box drawn around we can see they've all lined up because of that extra padding they all lined up nicely around everything so now we've got a whole load of blocks we can use to create our world and we hit apply here it'll apply those changes okay and once that supplies then we can just close that down and if we hit a little side out here again now we can see we've got a whole load of things we're just gonna I'm just going to zoom this out by dragging this little slider up and down if you you can make them really big or you can just zoom it out and make them nice and small so you can see we've got a whole load of items to use as background for our player so if we just go to the 6th object here which is kind of a generic grass tile and just to show you how this is all broken down actually and if we go back to here if you look at what items we've got here we got two blues and in the top of some blue and grass at blue I should say is water obviously him two bits of water at the top of bits of where grass and water meets and then some more grass here we go for sprite editor which apparently is gonna take a second to open but once we go back in here you should see that the whole top line of this sprite sheet is Creek is pulled out and created first so if we if I have to wait for this to open up so you can see the whole top line is created like I said and then the next line will start with some more blue stuff so rather than going down and cutting it that way it basically orders everything one by one as it goes along so if we scroll down here we can see the next line here is these kind of blue ones so what I'm going to do is just grab this green grass template here drag it in and pop it down there and we're going to create a few of these to use as the ground but as you can see if we drag our player on top of us for you we can use these and different items here to control the world but in unity and so by default with 2d it kind of sticks to this one and but if we were to use this one here for example this controls the size of things so we can like squash things up or down like that and then hit control Z to undo squash it that way or if we grab the middle we can just make it our bigger smaller like that we won't really want to mess too much around with that because pixel art you want to keep it all the same size and here we have rotation like this you can grab the sides and rotators or we can flip it forward or flip it around like that because at the end of day you see is a 3d program so we can rotate this stuff around in 3d but we don't want that either so we put that back to normal and then finally we have this kind of cross objects and this is moving things around in the world like this moving stuff around so this is what I was going to say if we move this over the player suddenly we see the grass is on top of the pair and that's obviously not what we want to happen we want the player to be behind that or sorry player to be on top of the grass and I'm finally out of these objects here we've got a hand tool this is the hand tool just lets you move around the world whatever way you want to but you can do the same if you have any other one selected if you right-click you can drag the world around around you and so we want to make sure the grass is behind the player so I'm just going to move this here so it's just like that and basically the way we can do this is by assigning a layer to our player and to our background object so here we have a sorting layer and there's only a default option so both are higher bita grams and our player around this sort in there for default so what we're going to do is click on that and we're going to add sorting there and when you click on that you brought to the tags and layers kind of section and basically all going to do is hit this little plus here and on this one we're going to say ground and then add another one and we're gonna say player and then what we'll do is we'll go back to these two different objects so we have our ground here and we can see it's been selected here we're going to set the certain there and s to be ground and then on our character guy which is has a really long object name because of where we pull them from and there and we don't want them call that so what we're going to do is click on this again and we're just going to rename this to player we have to worry too much about the ground because there's gonna be a hole into them and we're not going to worry about what they're called I put our player then we're gonna go through a certain layer and hit player so now what will happen is their player appears above the ground and if we go back to add in certain airs here what we can see is whatever layer ordered replaced in makes them appear in in different orders in the world so if we were to grab the player layer here grab the click on to line to grab it and pull it up soon it'll Claire will be behind the ground so it basically goes from the bottom here which is our default then the ground and then the player so if we add in more layers in the future like houses and stuff like that we'll know that we know which order to put them in in the world and so we have her a little bit of ground here but obviously that's not a lot for our player to move around on her and things so I'm just going to zoom out a little bit what we're going to do is in our higher here which is basically what tells us everything is active in our game at the moment I'm going to right-click on that and create an empty and I click on that again and we're just going to call - grams and the reason we're doing this is because we want to keep things nice and tidy and we're just going to set the position of this thing to be zero zero so it's at the center of our world we're going to do is grab the ground bit that we had here I just click on that and drag it into our ground here so what this will do is it'll pop it inside this ground object and then we're about to make a whole load of these and once you'll be able to then just click on this and they'll disappear editor hierarchy so it doesn't take a whole lot of space up when we started adding in enemies and moving other things around so on our Grahams reject this back down make sure we clicked on this one we're going to put this to zero zero as well and we'll zoom back in and what we're going to do is hit ctrl + D which will make a copy of it and then if you hold ctrl and click we're on the movement 1 still here so if you hold ctrl and click and drag on that like that it'll move it exactly one square in the world so if it is again we move it to here so we're going to ctrl on D again and again and then we're going to go back to our first guy here ctrl + D ctrl + D so now we've got a little section of grass we'll make another one I'm going to make another one actually on the other side here what we're going to do is select all of these and ctrl + D again and just as it creates a whole of them we're going to just drag up like this ctrl + D - oh I clicked off I'm gonna undo this because that's kind of annoying and yeah we've got a whole creation there now so do that like that and then we're going to drag hold to the bottom hold on to the bottom again and one more so now we've got a little bit of area for our player to move around up and you can see there's some weird gas form but that's ok a because if we switch over to game view here we're going to mess around the camera and we'll make sure these things and kind of create in these extra spaces we can right-click maximize you can see where we end up with some different lines but we're gonna deal with that as we go forward in the game for now is there's not a big concern and but as you can see we've got a busy little setup here now we've got a player in our world and we've got a whole lot of grass for him to walk around on but he can't do any walking yet so in the next episode we're going to take a look at writing some basic scripts to get our character moving around in the world so thanks for watching this very first episode of this RPG series I'll be back soon with some more at learning goodness thanks for watching goodbye thanks for checking out this episode and if you want even more gains plus jams goodness make sure you hit those subscribe and like buttons you can also find me on Twitter and Facebook by following the links on screen where you can find out all the latest news about the channel but if you want to help support the show check out the patreon page where you can get exclusive content in return for helping make the channel even better thanks for watching and stay tuned for more

Channel: gamesplusjames

Views: 652,179

Keywords: gaming, let's play, play, games, entertainment, retro, fun, Role-playing Game (Game Genre), unity rpg, unity 5 rpg, unity rpg tutorial, rpg game tutorial, unity rpg game tutorial, make an rpg tutorial, unity rpg setup

Id: Pk3GCgaNVTY

Length: 21min 6sec (1266 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/Calimariae]

Yeah gamesplusjames is great.

[u/creepy_robot]

I would highly recommend all of his courses for a few reasons. His extremely friendly (on Twitter he’s actually answered questions I’ve had), he takes the time to explain what he’s doing, and he really loves making games in Unity. I could not recommend enough.

[u/justusiv]

I liked a course of his i bought on Udemy.

[u/solidh2o]

I've been going through this over time, I love it!

My only complaint is that it's geared toward having little to no programming knowledge. I've been going through each tutorial and taking in the knowledge, then taking a few hours to make things a bit more organized for good programming practices.

Some examples:

• I've created a nice builder pattern and decorator pattern to build everything from script instead of having it litter the hierarchy.
• I also did a some work to have a single scene, and tile object pooling to allow for very large maps that were generated w/ perlin.
• I've been running w/ .net 4.6 and created rather than direct communication between components, created an async messaging component too coordinate communications between enemies / players / environments.
• with the above, I pushed all communication out of MonoBehavior objects, and onto the in memory bus.
• I added a reference to json.net to get a better JSON serialization for future web API use since the built in json provider is shitty.

That said, the core concepts are amazing! As a seasoned developer w/ 3d visualization experience, but little actual "game" development in my toolkit, it's been great for filling in some interesting gaps in knowledge I didn't even know i had. I can't wait to finish out, I'm in the teens for installment.

[u/wachimingoo]

he's great i've watched tons of tutorials for various things and his the one i learned the most.

he's currently streaming the progress in his game https://www.twitch.tv/gamesplusjames

[u/discogeek]

His stuff is all great. His course on Udemy is awesome, and he's always offering a huge discount. Follow him on Twitch and subscribe to his YouTube channel. Join his Discord server too. If you put in the effort with his stuff, you'll be able to learn a lot. And enjoy it all.

[u/KungFuHamster]

Ends at #40 I believe.

[u/joeymc72]

I'll have to watch this later

[u/[deleted]]

Found this a few months ago and it helped me quite a bit.