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Wizard Academy - Weekly Gamedev Study Group

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It looks like you should be using rb.position.z instead of rb.position.x in your third parameter. If you want an explanation as to why I can do that, but I figure you just overlooked the typo.

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Oh my god.  Yes, that solved it.  I mean I have an idea of what the code is meant to do here, it's clamping the position of the enemy ships so the swerve behavior doesn't take them beyond the boundaries of the play area, but by passing them the x value to their z position, I'm guessing I was keeping them from existing outside of a 12-unit square centered on the world origin.

 

I am two for two for frustrating issues caused by typo blindness.

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Since Application.LoadScene() is now depreciated and they don't seem to provide a new way to restart in the tutorial I'm going to post the solution I came up with:

 

 

make sure to add:

using UnityEngine.SceneManagement;

at the top, then in the main part of the script:

 

void Update(){
		if (restart) {
			if (Input.GetKey (KeyCode.R)){
				int sceneBuildInt = SceneManager.GetActiveScene ().buildIndex;
				SceneManager.LoadScene (sceneBuildInt);
			}
		}
	}

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Here's a good example of why I'm glad I'm doing these tutorials:
I just learned the difference between Vector3.forward and transform.forward

The first is in world coordinates and the latter is in local coordinates.

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I finished the Space Shooter tutorial today and I really enjoyed it. I think I'm going to put tutorials on hiatus for an indefinite period of time because I have a lot that I want to chew on now. I'm playing with adapting Space Shooter for something more interesting in VR and I'm having to replace pretty much every script and tune it differently. I have some other projects I want to work on too.

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Hey Professor Wizards, I got my add/drop class scroll all filled out and I'm jumping in! I couldn't start earlier because I was staying on an island with little to no internet, but now I'm back!

Thank you so so much for doing this! I'm working on the ball tutorial, should have it finished by tomorrow. Had a number of setbacks with a weird way my unity booted up for the first time, but restarting it fixed all of them. (Had no lighting, couldn't make shadows, etc).

I really enjoy coding from dipping my toe in twine, ruby, and java. I've never really committed to one besides twine, and it seems like the way coding concepts are being presented he's assuming some familiarity with the language. Would an intro to C# be a good idea in conjunction with this? 

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My personal experience was that following along with the scripting portion of the tutorials (2 years ago) made no sense at all, but after doing a few tutorials I had enough experience and questions about C# that I had something to have in mind when watching c# tutorials. For me, the C#ness of Unity isn't the part I really needed to learn as much as how to look up the Unity-specific functions and how they communicate to each other and within Unity's inspector.

A C# tutorial won't hurt, but I doubt it will help a ton.

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I've updated the first post to reflect the third assignment, the Survival Shooter tutorial.  

 

Beyond the roll-a-ball tutorial being first, I'm not sure that the tutorial projects are meant to be gone through in any particular order, because the space shooter also introduced a lot of the same concepts as roll-a-ball (and was clearly recorded much earlier).  Which is fine, reviewing stuff you already know as you learn new concepts is important.

 

Rilen - I'm not a programmer, I had a semester and a half of c++ in college and so far I've found the coding portions of the Unity learning material to be very intuitive! I'm also going through the scripting portion of the tutorials alongside the projects, which is much more helpful, I think, than just trying to do the scripting tutorials by themselves.  Having to use the code in the context of actual games makes it easier to understand how it's supposed to be use.

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So I'm two tutorials deep into the Survival Shooter game and I was mistaken in assuming that they all cover the same basic concepts, because this one talks about adding animation components and creating animation states. So that's fun.

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Finished the Survival Shooter game.  Here's the browser-playable version.

 

There's some bugs in this one with how the gun behaves when shooting the hellephants because I think I fucked up somewhere in building the hellephant prefab - the video said to use the hellephant prefab but there wasn't one, so I tried to make my own, but there were no instructions to follow as to how to do that, and most of the code was pre-built so it's hard to figure out where the break point is, and it's friday and I don't actually care that much about fixing it because I wanna dig into the animation tutorials a bit more before moving on to next week's project.

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This week is the Tanks tutorial! Only eight sections, maybe that means this one is relatively short compared to the previous two? We'll see!

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I did not finish the tanks game yet and I think I'm the only person actively doing these right now so I'm gonna make tanks a two-week thing.

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Great! I have been working on them but things slowed waaay down because of hectic personal life. I do not have a background in this beyond being someone who enjoys poking around computer systems and wants to see a thing made, so things are slow going at first because the tutorials don't really go over basic definitions and concepts. Also he seems to have different presets/other things than my version, so things look different and sometimes are created in different states, but I learn more from having to unpick these problems. I did spend a day trying to figure out why there was no light in my game until I just restarted Unity 3 times and it fixed itself, so that was less helpful. 

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 I did spend a day trying to figure out why there was no light in my game until I just restarted Unity 3 times and it fixed itself, so that was less helpful. 

 

A fast way to fix this is to create a "directional light" and then rotate it a bit by changing the x,y,and z values in the "rotation" parameter of its "transform" component in the Inspector.

Directional lights are kinda universal, they just light everything in your scene. 

There are other ways to deal with it, but this is the simplest imo.

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Good tip, thanks. I was also wondering if there is a quick and easy way to move 3D items around on a plane without worrying about the Y-axis. I mean using the sliders for the other axes works, but it's not very natural for setting a scene. Is there a way to lock one of the axeses?

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Alright!
https://hellameaty.itch.io/wak2spaceshooter
I finished the expanded Space Shooter Tutorial, with enemies, different music, and a bunch of small tweaks. Basically I made everything a little bit faster to make the new music but kept the asteroids slow. The ships aren't moving that much faster, but that background scrolling speed is increased and the tilt when the ship swerves is upped so it feels a little better. Also I am apparently placing all of these games in a linked universe. 

I've also taken a page from's root's book and created an Itchio page

On 10/3/2016 at 0:45 PM, root said:

so I'm gonna make tanks a two-week thing.

Awesome. I'm catching up! The shooter took a solid week, I'm glad to have a little more time for the next one. I know 2 weeks my time doesn't sync up to you, but if you're taking a break I'll be along shortly. Note: the games do not size properly when uploaded to Unity. The supplied Viewport Dimensions are way way too small. So when viewing your Space Shooter you can fly off the screen, the score is hidden, etc. I didn't know where to look for a bit, in case anyone else has this problem, open Unity, then 'Build Settings' -> 'Player Settings'  -> 'Resolution'. These values are still a little too small to read text at the top of the screen, so I multiplied the values by 1.2 and that seemed to work. I feel like there must be an easier way or perhaps I've missed something, but maybe not. 

Really enjoying doing this, and I don't think I ever would have if it wasn't for you root. Thank you. 

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I completely flaked out this week so you've got time!

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Oh this is rad and i just saw it! I might just back to week one this week.

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I posted to #game-dev on Slack that I'd just completed the Roll-A-Ball tutorial on Saturday. I started looking into the Space Shooter tutorial, so I'll either get started on that or jump ahead to catch up with this. I'll try to upload to itch.io or similar soon.

 

I'm also writing a Ph.D. thesis, so I may get slowed down a bit, but I'm hoping to dedicate 0.5-1 hours per day to working through this along with you wizards.

 

Complete aside, does anyone know where to find IdleThumbs sound effects? I'm interested in playing around with adding custom sounds, and they would undoubtedly be better than recording myself on a $3 monoprice headset.

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Do you mean Thumbs-specific sounds? B/c I have a lot of resources for free stuff but not Thumb stuff. 

Whoever Joseph Abbell is, he made the Thumbs soundboard and is therefore sound-rich. Yournamehere's entry also had a ton of Thumbs sounds, I thought there was a database or something kicking around. 

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I was thinking Thums-specific sounds. E.g. it'd be over-the-top silly to play "Wizaaaard!" when you complete the roll-a-ball game. I'll see what I can track down and share a link if I find anything.

 

Also, thanks for the resources!

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Hey guys, I'm working on the Survival Shooter and there's something I need help on. The colors in my scene are much much lighter than what I'm seeing in the tutorial, and game objects don't appear to be casting shadows. Root, you're finished product on Itch doesn't appear to have shadows either. Are we missing something?

EDIT: Dammit, something really weird is happening. The correct darkness and shadows pop in only when I'm running the game and the player dies then it restarts. On my "2nd life" everything looks much better. Going through to watch everything to see what changes but baffled. 

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I haven't done this tutorial... did they have you place lighting? Sounds like that is probably the issue, but I primarily do 2D stuff, so I probably won't be a ton of help...

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