First Conversion Phase!

A fine day to you, good readers!

The Tutorial Phase for my first project is now over, leading us to the Conversion Phase. As you may recall, this is the part where I apply my newly acquired knowledge of C# to adapt the mechanics learnt in the Tutorial Phase to form a new style of gameplay.

As mentioned in previous posts, I have been learning the coding techniques from a platformer-style game over the last week. This means I have available to me movement and jumping mechanics, some basic shooting, a scrolling camera, and parallaxing layers of terrain.

Overall, the tutorial was less useful than I had hoped; for one thing, many pieces of fairly critical code were pre-made class files from the Unity3D website, which the tutorial's creator didn't bother to go over. I have and will continue to review these, though they appear at first glance to be somewhat more complex than the code demonstrated. Another problem was that, unknown to me at the start of this project, the tutorial was (and still is) not complete. This means that I will be working with only partial knowledge of the game being demonstrated and the techniques used, but this should hopefully be enough to get on with.

So, then, what is my plan for the Conversion Phase? What manner of game will I be making?

In the interest of helping me to learn what I can from the tutorial, and better understand certain key components (namely the parallax scrolling and mouse position calculations), as well as mildly amusing/irritating my tutors, I will be creating a variant of an endless runner style game.



In the game I have in mind, the player will control a character using only the mouse; when the player clicks the mouse button, the character will jump towards the pointer. This will be used in conjunction with multiple layers of moving platforms, advancing towards the player at different (and gradually increasing) speeds, which the player must jump between to avoid falling off the edge of the screen.



I very much like the idea of using the parallax scrolling in a more mechanical manner. In the tutorial, it was simply used to make different layers of the fore- and background terrain move at different speeds as the player explored the game world, creating a pleasant movement effect, but I think the technique has more potential to certain types of games.

I'll begin work on this game either tonight or tomorrow, depending on how much I sleep and how much work I need to perform for a different project. Updates here will follow when I start making some decent progress and with any luck, a decent version of the game I have in mind will be ready by this Sunday.



Please do wish me luck, readers. Have yourselves a fine afternoon.