My Adventure Into Unity

Game development has always been something I've been on the fence about. On one hand, it's this cool thing where I can create something I want to play, and I can shape and make the game mine. On the other hand, it's this daunting task that takes time, effort, and money. It's for these reasons I never really sat down and even focused on learning the basics needed to create even a basic game (other than the few small games I had to make for a spring term course).

I've also always had this place in my heart for games in the style of classic Zelda and Mario: 2D, top down / side scrollers. Looking at them, they seem like overall they would be much easier to sit down and develop.

With the idea that working on one would be a fun, albeit frustrating adventure, I finally sat down and installed Unity and pulled out the old C# programming book I bought a few years ago as a refresher. Now all that was left before I jumped into it was deciding what I wanted to create.

I settled on remaking one of those games from that spring term course.

One of the first things I did was realize that collision isn't this simple to handle thing, and the base way of handling that every tutorial out there uses is just bad. It involved sticking a circle collider on the bottom of the object and using that to determine collision; this wasn't going to work for me. But that's where the first glimpse of the power of Unity came in - they have a fantastic asset marketplace.

I searched around and found two incredible assets that I decided were worth the price - one to build tilemaps directly within Unity and another that handle collision in a much cleaner fashion. Using these meant I could focus on learning more about Unity itself, which was the whole goal of sitting down.

Over the next couple days I played about with the Unity editor - animations, player controls, collision, GameObjects, all that fun Unity stuff.

In the end, I managed to create a basic replica of the original game, animated and all, with a few bugs I'll clean up over time. It's not much, but it's something I can be proud of moving forward as I learned a great deal about Unity.

It's also inspired me to focus on turning some old projects (e.g. an old text based game I wrote when I first started learning to program), and to begin thinking about finally creating a game I've had in my head for a long time.