First Project is out — Roller Madness
Today is an exciting day! I just built my first game ever — The Roller Madness. This is the second project from Coursera’s “Introduction to Game Development” course. The game concept was provided by the course instructors. You are a rolling boll in the magic world full of coins and enemies. Your objective is to collect a defined number of coins (displayed on a screen) to proceed to the next level. If you fall off the grid or collide with an enemy you are dead and have to replay the level.
Time: ~5 hours
Project Details:
A majority of the scripts used in this project were Unity standard assets or provided by the instructor. I created only one script Change Camera, which is used in Level 2 to switch cameras (moving from platform 1 to platform 2) and add complexity to the level.
Using the standard assets I developed two levels of the game, added the player (tennis ball), coins, and enemies, set up respawn logic for coins and enemies, applied Smooth Follow to the camera, death/trigger zones, FX (trail path, explosion), UI elements (labels and buttons).
Final Thoughts:
It was fun and easy exercise. It was mostly instructed, so I just had to re-apply the provided knowledge to make changes and add character to the game.
The main challenge was with Level 2, where I decided to use two levels (basically, player has to collect all the coins from platform 1 and roll to platform 2). The problem was with the camera, because Smooth Follow did not keep the same distance and on change of the platform, it felt more like Top view, where it was hard to estimate the proportions and objects.
So I added the secondary camera and developed a script to change the view onTriggerEvent (from Main Camera to Secondary Camera) and reset the camera in case of death.
