Trash Panda Pileup - Devlog 1
- sbrowncomputers
- Aug 26, 2020
- 2 min read
My first game. I've had ideas for games before, but I never knew where to start, so I put it off. But this time, I decided I was just going to start! I have to start somewhere, or I'll never get anywhere. And as Mary Poppins said, Well Begun is Halfway Done!
So I decided I was going to make a game where you move a character around the screen, and pick things up. I decided on a raccoon (aka a "trash panda") finding food, and started with some quick and dirty sprites to use:
I haven't really coded in Unity before, but I have it installed on my computer, and I've started a few test projects (that lie in folders, collecting dust). I had to look through a lot of tutorials and documentation, but I managed to create a tiled background from Ground1, and add my edges and corners as well.
The hardest bit was creating the character and moving it around. The Unity tutorials were based on an outdated version, so I spent a lot of time in the API documentation trying to translate from what was used to what I needed for my game.
My boyfriend recommended that I add a little "wiggle" to the raccoon's walk, and instead of adding frames to an animation, I simply rotated the sprite. It took both of us, a whiteboard, and some creative coding to get it to work!
At the end of Day 1, I have a working game. The raccoon walks to the edges of the screen but doesn't go off, pressing a directional button once you're moving in that direction doesn't reset the wiggle, and overall I'm really happy with it.
It's a really modular design, and I feel like it'll be really expandable as I add new features in.
Below is a quick video of what I accomplished today:
Next Steps:
- Add in food, generated randomly
- Pick up food
- Points for food
- "Lose" state - how does the game end?
What do you think? Look like a game worth playing yet? I sure hope so. :)
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