Week 7 Update
This week has been incredibly educational. I finished and published my exercise game, Travelscape Puzzle Gallery. It’s just 12 photo puzzles, but I learned a lot in the process.
I did all the graphic design for it, so I picked up more Inkscape skills, such as bending text and working with shapes more efficiently while drawing frames. I experimented with color schemes, and the biggest takeaway from designing this game is that I need to find a good course on user interfaces and carefully design the UI for my main game.
I used some free sounds and learned about licensing. I couldn’t find a sound I liked for moving puzzle pieces, so I used my phone to record one and found online tools for cutting and editing sounds, like MP3Cut.net. I’m happy I did this because, for simple sounds, it might be faster to record them than browse the internet for the perfect one. I was surprised that sounds from a phone recorder can be good enough for my needs.
The most important part was my Unity development. I started with this example project and built on it. Here’s what I learned:
- Materials
- Lists and dictionaries in C#
- UI panels and buttons
- Saving data in user settings (I saved the IDs of solved puzzles as a simple save game mechanism)
- Difference between Unity’s Start and Awake hooks
- Using LeanTween to move objects, change colors, and fade elements in
- Coroutines
- Different approaches to structuring code
This last point is the biggest takeaway from Unity: I need to sit down and design my code architecture; otherwise, I will drown in spaghetti code. This is the hardest part, and I’m in the process of rethinking my initial idea for the main game loop logic.
Despite knowing my code isn’t perfect, I decided to make the repo public: GitHub - Travelscape Puzzle Gallery. Maybe I’ll get some advice on how to improve it in the future.
What a week!