
Things I learned from creating my first Unity 2D Platformer
Introduction
This project was made for an end of the year project at Holberton School San Francisco. The platformer I made was supposed to replicate life in a small and fun way. In life, we run into many obstacles, and trials that we have to get passed to be able to get to our end goal. In this game, you will face different “enemies” including water, and spikes. If you hit either of these, you will be sent back to the start of the level. Also, I added coins to signify currency in the real world. The team consisted of Grayson Stiegler (myself). I chose to do this project solo so I could get more out of creating a game and have a better understanding of what it takes to create something like this in two weeks. The timeline for this project in total was around a month. But the actual building process was about two weeks. The first week consisted of planning everything about, reading documentation, watching tutorials, etc. This first week was all about me getting familiar with the layout of the program and also getting knowledge of how my game was going to be created. The second week of the building process, was all about actually creating the game, and getting all the mechanics working, all the levels created, etc. This project showed me how much I can actually do in just two weeks' time. RunningForSuccess was made for all audiences. If you like to play games, it was made for you, and anyone else just trying to have a little fun. It wasn’t made with any particular audience in mind. It was just made for people who like to enjoy themselves. Personally, my focus for this project was just being able to create what I wanted to create. It showed me my capabilities in what I can actually put together with my determination and knowledge.
Why I chose this Project
I have always had a love for video games, no matter the type. It’s always been a type of escape. And also, I’ve always wanted to know what goes into creating such a thing. So in this project, I took it upon myself to understand and see how games were created and the work put in to make games, even a little game like this took two weeks so I have huge respect for game developers now. This project really gave me some insight on what game developers go through to give their customers aka players the best experience they can have. I am really glad I chose to do this on my own, not just for the knowledge, but for the experience I gained while creating my own game. This has shown me a lot about myself and a lot about my capabilities.
What I’ve Accomplished in this project
I’ve accomplished many things, but there are a couple of things that stick out to me. Including, learning a new program (Unity) and language (C#) by myself in just two weeks. This was one of my biggest accomplishments throughout my journey at Holberton School. It showed me that all the things I learned, the way they teach us to teach ourselves so we understand what we are actually doing and how we can implement it into may different things that we do. My second biggest accomplishment would have to be, being able to put everything I learned into one project. Putting all the documentation I read, all the videos I watched and anything else that I learned along the way, I was able to put it into one huge project. Which at the start, I was very skeptical about if I was actually going to be able to finish the project. But, I stayed strong throughout the whole process and happy to say I completed my first game “RunningForSuccess”. Even though I didn't learn everything about Unity and C# I learned the basics, and then some. Which I am really proud of.
What was my most difficult technical challenge
I had some challenges, which isn't uncommon with these types of things, but my biggest challenge was movement. This component took me longer than anything else while creating this game. It may sound easy, but when you are actually working on it and need a game object to move, it gets pretty tricky. My second big challenge would have to be doing the project solo. Even though doing it solo was a big accomplishment and taught me more than it would if I had a partner, it would've made the process a lot easier and the project could’ve been bigger and better. I wish I could’ve taken this project to the next level and I plan to do just that in the near future. This project has also shown me, that even if you have big challenges, don’t give up. Because the end result will always be worth it.
In conclusion
At the end of the project, I had a lot to take away. More than I can even think of. But the main things I would take away would have to be, building something from nothing and having a working app in the end. But with that comes things I would do differently. The main thing I would do differently would have to be not working on one single thing for too much time. This gave me some setbacks and in the end wasted some of my time. I’ve taken what I have learned and will use it in upcoming projects and mainly anything I do in life. Don’t spend too much time on one thing, take a step back, work on some other things and then come back to the original problem and solve it then. This project showed me that I probably don’t want to do game development in the future. I know that I am more of a front-end person than a back-end person. So, I am probably going to stick with front-end for my future software engineering path.
About Me
My name is Grayson Stiegler, I am a Full-Stack Software engineer with knowledge in C, Python, Java, Bash, HTML, and CSS and other small languages here and there.
Link to RunningForSuccess repository: https://github.com/gstieg/RunningForSuccess
Link to my Landing page for RunningForSuccess
Link to my LinkedIn
