Know Your Limits and Make A Game

After rigging my player model and anticipating to finishing the controls for each bone, I realized — I don’t know how to move the bones.

The progression of animation is following my Animation II class where we are going over rigging right now. Since I have to wait another week to animate my player, I decided to go back to the game itself.

My game needs to be played somehow and I wasn’t totally happy with my first prototype last semester.

Degradation is a third person video game and what this means is that the camera is placed directly “behind” the player. The tricky bit is that I was having trouble with is the camera control while the player is rotating.

The camera acts independently of the player and does not dictate the direction of the player’s movement. But you are able to control both the camera AND the player at once.

The solution was the Standard Assets for Unity 4.6 available in the Unity Asset Store. I was initially worried if I was allowed to use any of these assets but Unity states that “and example scenes can be used to kickstart your Unity learning or be used as the basis for your own projects.” The asset store is there for a reason especially if you’re not capable of doing everything.

This is when I learned that it’s okay not to be amazing at everything.

I’m not a good coder but I’m decent at modeling and will work day and night designing an amazing upgrade system with a menu included.

After I imported all the assets over, I ran the CharacterThirdPerson scene which included a camera, character, and platforms to practice the movement on. Since I want people to quickly understand the feeling of the game, I edited the project input settings to allow a controller to be used. This article was helpful to figure out the axises of the analog sticks while I used this site for the button numbers on the pad. This brought up an interesting problem I wasn’t thinking; how many buttons will the player be using? As of now, I’m planning 4 buttons and the 2 analog sticks but I know more buttons will be added since more mechanics will be added.

Hopefully next week, I’ll finally be able to do the animation of the player.