I'm concerned when it comes time for the students to make their own games based on Balloon Pop, Pong, Space Invaders, Path Finder and a Super Epic Man they wont understand how to do it. Even though I've been teaching them scripting every single week, it takes time to become a game developer, and more importantly a problem solver.
So I've been working on my own versions of games they could make if they try to modify the code. I've already completed a conversion of Pong to Breakout. ( about 8 hours over the last 6 weeks ). I've been doing it during class time while students work from the book, so they can see how I convert the game. I was surprised to find one student was copying me, and had almost got the point I had in the first week.
That's completed now and shows how to convert Pong using the same graphics into a brick breaking game.
The next one I'm going to work on is Space Invaders but I plan to make a vertical shooter with it in the popular style of "Bullet Heck" or Danmaku which is the evolution of the shooter into a game where the player spends most of their time dodging the patterned spray of bullets from boss enemies.
http://touhou.wikia.com/wiki/Danmaku
For the AI pathfinding tutorial I'm going to show them an old game called Mikie. It was also called Bovver Boy, and involves moving a student around classrooms and hallways, trying to avoid the teacher and the janitor.
It's a good one for the students because they can focus on character as present with each student, the teacher and the environment, and it shows a simple but challenging integration of AI path finding in a game other than Pacman.
I was also thinking about using Pengo for a path finding example too, but the complication of sliding blocks and matching combinations of blocks might be too hard for the students.
I've also been looking at some other alternatives and what I would like to do in the future is present these games (Dr Do, Bobble Bubble, Bomber Man and Dig Dug) to students as an exercise every couple of weeks and see if they can map out the functional specification for the each game - i.e. how they would program it.
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Multiplayer for UNity
Started at 3:15 PM Sunday 24th March 2013.
(spent 30 mins on this so far)
Spending my Sunday arvo looking into SmartFox for Unity with the hopes to set up a tutorial for the students to set up a simple multiplayer game. I guess the only issue is going to be the TAFE network blocking the ports.
http://www.smartfoxserver.com/labs/API/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qD9RxZaXByo
Will report back later.
Found a couple of other links.
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/Networked%20Multiplayer.html
http://www.m2h.nl/files/M2H_Networking_Tutorial.pdf
Thursday, March 21, 2013
Info about using FONTs
Here's a link that discusses it. Basically if it's embedded ie you can't extract it, just look at it, it costs nothing. However if you ship the font with a product you need to get a license.
http://xboxforums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/11511.aspx
http://xboxforums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/11511.aspx
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Created video tutorials to assist 3d modelling class.
From Thursday 14th March 8:30 pm - 10:30 pm, Friday 15th March 7:30 - 9:30 pm, then finally Sunday 17th March 6:30 - 8:30 pm (6 hours total), I research, tested and implemented several techniques for students to convert their 3dsmax characters to work in Unity to help the Diploma Games students in their 3d Modelling class. It was apparent that in the lecture (not mine) they had trouble getting their characters in to Unity, so in consultation with their lecturer I developed 6 video tutorials and a handful of assets to demonstrate the technique to put the characters in.
Pathfinding, GUI and Combat
Yesterday (20th March 2013) I started working on research for putting pathfinding, GUI and combat into Unity for the students. I worked from 2:30pm to 7:00pm then 7:30pm to 12:00am (10 hours -phew!) researching and developing software to allow the students to move enemy to find the player, GUI technology to show score, ammo and health on their display and then mount a gun and fire projectiles.
Below are some screen shots of the work.
Attached is the resource I developed.
This is part of the code to allow the enemy to find any object the student wants to drop into its properties. |
This is more of the code and is called every 3 seconds to relocate the player. |
Here is the path finding in action, using a Grid Graph to draw a path to the player. |
The student is instructed to attach a gun to the player, then add a nozzle displaced along the barrel to provide a launch point for the bullets. |
With the gun socketed to the player object and the projectile code in place the player can now loose off a few rounds. |
Using NGUI the student can easily customise their own UI to meter vital statistics in the game. |
Once the student has exported the font they want, they can the assign it to an Atlas map and place UI elements into the game. |
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