How Sushi-Me was made / How I began using Unity/Inkscape
Sushi-Me is an interactive game where you create falling sushi that you try and land in the Hungry Dragon’s mouth.
The goal is to amass as high of a score as you can!
Avoid the greedy enemies whose only job is to block the delicious sushi from reaching Hungry Dragon.
Sushi-Me was created with two programs; Inkscape and Unity. They made making this game a breeze. Thanks to Unity, time that would otherwise have been spent loading and hooking up textures to C++ or Java classes was spent making the look and feel of the game better.
Unity
In a nutshell, Unity development works by creating gameObjects to which you attach components and scripts. So what are gameObjects, components, and scripts? you may be asking.
GameObjects are the base class for whatever you may be making. You can think of it as the base model of a car without any special interior seating or amenities added to it.
Components are like pre-built pieces of code that provide a set of extra functionality to your gameObject. These can be altered by the scripts you create.
Scripts are instructions where you may control your game logic or in other words the way your gameObjects work together. This can range from adjusting a part of a component or controlling what screen a button may lead to.
In took me a little bit to familiarize myself with Unity. I began with learning how to make gameObjects move with attached images. From there I moved on to spawning objects on touch, saving data between sessions, switching between scenes, and assigning functions/scripts to buttons.
Inkscape
All the artwork for sushi-me was created in Inkscape. It took a lot of trial and error to make the feel of the images look right. Inkscape is very similar to adobe illustrator except its free and open source! It allows you to make Scalable Vector Graphics(SVG) which is the reason why the lines of all images are rendered so sharply. It allows you to make some pretty nice graphics. Some things to keep in mind while drawing would be attention to detail, where your light source for the image may be, and where the shadows will be.
I was also surprised that Unity supported animation. You can accomplish this by drawing each frame of animation in your art program of choice and then dragging all of those frames onto your gameObject in the hierarchy panel in Unity. Unity will handle animating the frames you selected in the order each image was clicked on. You can also click on the animation it creates and edit it from there.
In all Unity and Inkscape aren’t that complicated. At times you can get information overload but that can be substantially reduced by setting small simple goals and completing them. Also if it is your first game development project choose something relatively small or simple and advance from there. Remember, Rome was not built in a day!
