Category: Videogames

I have been teaching myself game development using Unity for a few weeks now. I’ve put together a small project for my nephews that I’m calling “Robot Slayer”: a FPS shooter, with robots. Unfortunately, Unity decided to pull the rug out from under all developers this week with their predatory pricing changes, and it has pretty much stalled my interest in learning Unity further. Still, it was a fun project, and I am putting my mini game on my site here if anyone is interested: RobotSlayer. It’s just one small level and a bit janky, but it’s playable and you can run it in your browser. I’ve also put the code for it up on GitHub.

My nephews wanted me to make a videogame for them, so I’m teaching myself some C# game dev within Unity. After watching several tutorials, I started by creating an arena where I could test attaching scripts to game objects. I experimented with textures and skyboxes a bit. A script for player movement was easy enough to get working. Then I wrote a basic script to have objects move through the environment while avoiding obstacles via Raycasting. That looked like this:

I'm teaching myself #gamedevelopment in Unity and this is my current experiment. I made a basic environment, so I could test a simple AI script that makes the boxes avoid the player and navigate away from walls. It's janky, but it's a start. #indiedev pic.twitter.com/m2PRvGvpPu

— Austin (@scifiworkshop) August 25, 2023

Next, I created a proper enemy, with a bit of basic AI. Using the code for avoiding obstacles, I added a function to cause the enemy to stalk the player through the environment and to attack when the player is spotted. Then I created a simple weapons system and armed the enemy and the player. (This also gave me a chance to play with Bloom post-processing to get the projectiles “glowy”.) This is where I’m at now:

Some progress on the #Unity game I'm making to teach myself #gamedev: I made an enemy with some limited AI that can track the player and avoid obstacles. I also created a weapons system. pic.twitter.com/3aZdY4gyvf

— Austin (@scifiworkshop) September 7, 2023

Next on the agenda:

• create a damage system so the enemy and player will take damage when hit
• create an effect to communicate the destruction of an enemy
• create an effect that will communicate when the player takes damage
• write an enemy spawn script that will generate new enemies whenever an enemy is destroyed
• build a weapon change system