How I Made My First Unity Game in Six Hours
Last month I joined a Game Development AR and VR course offered by Boca Code with nearly no experience in software development. Currently, I’m in the process of switching career gears from retail to tech and after taking a few courses in Web Development and User Experience I decided to indulge my fantasy of a future in video game development when I signed up for this class.
On day 1 I showed up to the Boca Code space feeling a bit intimidated and like I’d gotten myself in over my head. I was doubtful when the instructor, Todd Albert, told us by Friday we’ll have made our own fully functioning game, however, that doubt subsided over the first 4 hour class of the week when we went from downloading Unity to making our first functioning game — a simple plane with a sphere rolling around that I could control in a third person perspective. To say I was elated would be an understatement, I felt empowered after writing my first few lines of code and motivated to find out what else I could make.
On day 2, my excitement continued to grow as we took our simple game, added a cylinder, transformed it into a coin shape, and made it slowly spin on our game board. A couple lines of code later and we could now collect coins and keep score in the top left corner of our screen. By the end of day 2 I was casually using game development terminology such as ‘prefab’ and ‘capsule collider’, and I had a working game with a purpose.
Day 3 we dove into the Unity Asset Store and plundered some of the best free assets we could find starting with the Standard Assets pack developed by Unity itself which became the core of what made my final game successful. Todd showed us how to import assets into our game scenes and how to bring in the elements needed to make our own unique vision come to life. It was at that point that I knew somehow, some way, I needed to make my game about…corgis. After a false start, I had created a new scene and imported apartment furniture assets and a cute little 3D corgi knight model that stood in the middle of the kitchen and swung his sword around. At the end of the day I left with the one minor problem… my corgi wouldn’t move.
Day 4, motivated by the progress I made in such a short time, I arrived at Boca Code early and went to work troubleshooting my stationary corgi. I quickly realized this was purely a model and did not have any coding attached asking it to move around. After struggling through a few attempts to code this myself, I turned to Todd who reminded me I had the Unity Standard Asset pack and there was no need for me to program any of this from scratch, all I needed was a third party controller. Getting back to work, I stripped Ethan (the protagonist in all the Unity sample scene games) down to nothing but a capsule collider and code, and added my 3D corgi knight model onto his frame. After tweaking Ethan’s collider a bit to line up with the shorter, chubbier corgi, he was running around the house. Now I needed to give him purpose. I have two Pembroke Welsh corgis of my own running around my apartment and the only thing that can get them to slow down is ice cubes. This became my corg-knights sole job: collect all the ice cubes from around the house and return to the fridge for more. I threw a floating 3D cube into the scene as day 4 ended, and later, couldn’t sleep that night in anticipation of finishing my first game the next day.
Day 5, our last day of class, began with our normal lecture for the first half. Todd spoke to us about breaking into the game dev industry, starting a career, and gave us advice I felt transcended gaming and could be applied to everyday life. After a short break we began to work on our games. I loaded up my scene and got back to my ice cubes. I reached back to what I learned on day 2 and made a simple HUD (heads-up display) that showed the player’s ice cube count. Now I needed to write the same code for my cubes that we had used in our simple ball and coin game in order to collect the cubes, make them disappear from the game, and update the ice cube counter as you went along. Sorting through my day 2 code I was able to pull what I needed and add it into my nearly completed game. With a little more guidance from Todd I got my code working and my game was completely functioning with time to spare. Utilizing the remaining time left before our presentations, I worked on dressing it up a bit more which included adding spotlights to the lamps and texture and glow to the ice cubes.
Presenting the game I built felt like one of my biggest accomplishments of 2020. As I began the demo I was a bit nervous and my hands were shaking, but that all began to wash away as my corgi knight successfully navigated the apartment and collected all of his cubes. To my surprise, once we all presented, Todd announced that there would be winners based on our game’s functionality. I was shocked when he counted down from 3rd place to 1st and I was called last winning a cushy new gaming headset and a heart full of pride. That night I went home with a new sense of confidence and motivation to complete and deploy my game.
After a well-deserved, relaxing Saturday morning coffee, I reopened my game and created the “welcome” and “game over” screens with help from Brian Wilkinson’s YouTube Unity tutorials. By exploring the player settings I discovered I could add a splash screen to the beginning of my game, so I decided to officially name my new game Corgis in ParadICE and made a graphic in Canva just silly enough to work. Transforming my PNG to a sprite with a couple clicks, I added it to the start of my game and deployed it to Firebase. It was a somewhat surreal moment seeing my game come to life in a browser window.
Reflecting on the first day of the course I had doubted I would even comprehend the course material much less be able create a working game. Going from no previous knowledge to running around a virtual space as a character I programmed made me feel confident that I can break into a new career, I can continue learning, and I can succeed in the world of tech. In January 2021, I am taking the next steps toward this goal by starting a full time software engineering bootcamp with Boca Code and I’ll be taking my experiences and new-found confidence into the classroom with me.
If you’d like to play Corgis in ParadICE click here.
