Things I've learnt

Wow, it's been a while, huh?

It's come to the end of my time at Uni, and this year's been a blast. I've had a whole lot of fun making my game.

I've been using the tutorials from Brackeys and Wabble, which for whatever reason, when I couldn't get things working, Wabble managed to make everything simple.

Speaking of simple, I learnt a thing today going over everything with a fine tooth-comb.

This.

What is this?

It's a physicsMaterial2D, found by right clicking and finding it in create. 

What does it do?

As you can see in this post where my character was getting stuck mid-air jumping into a collider - it stops it getting stuck! Wahey! It was literally as easy as adding that onto the colliders on the player and turning it all down to zero.

What I love and hate about Unity is it's simultaneously difficult and ridiculously easy.

When you know what to do, everything flows seamlessly. When you don't, it's always on the tip of your tongue that you know what you want to do, but you've got no idea how to implement it. 

The worst part is it's always right there.

The second thing I've learnt is that I am not good at coding.

I liken it to learning a new language - you know some beginners' words, but know none of the grammar, so nothing makes sense. Fortunately in spoken languages, people can guess what somebody is trying to say despite horrible pronunciation and grammar.

Unfortunately for me, a computer won't do that. 

Usually, I've found my biggest mistakes are in punctuation. Curse you, parenthesis, semi colons, capital letters, tiny letters, full stops!

The third thing I've learnt during this is that note taking is so important when trying to code something.

//Take notes for everything. Does this look important? Take a note.

//What do I want to do here? Take a note.

The first few tutorials I was looking at had no note taking, so I was relying on audio to help me to remember what does what. Then, my brother told me the magic of the // to take a note to help write a code. 

//Thanks Dan! Best brother ever.

Perhaps the most important thing I've learnt is to never stop trying to better myself and to always ask for help. Everyone who I've spoken to have been so supportive, and believed in me even when I didn't. So here's to you guys. What brilliant people.

Also I didn't post for a whole month and a half. I have shamed myself. I can no longer call this a bi-daily blog. 

31/3/15 - Whack-a-Mole no more!

I've likened my problems in Unity to Whack-a-Mole.

When one problem goes down, another pops up.

So here's what's happened so far:

***Problems working out how big the sprites are when imported into Unity***

Cheating with a sized box around each sprite won't work - it's a case of going into photoshop, cropping it down to the pixel, and dividing the dimensions by how many sprites are across/down

***Problems with sprites not lining up***

That's a case for pivots, and not sprite sizes, as I initially thought.

***Assorted coding issues***

For whatever reason, I missed whole lines of code. I don't know how. The secondary issues were missing curly brackets and capital letters where they were/weren't supposed to be

***Jumping***

Turns out, I had my gravity on waaaaaaaay too high. The next problem was getting the animation to play properly when she falls. That was just trial and error.

But guess what?

I've done it!... For now at least. 

I've got a minor issue going on with the camera tracking, but I'm pretty sure this is easily sorted out with a bit of code that keeps the Y axis fixed. I'm not a coder, so this'll take a bit of research, or some help with someone in the know.

Ahhh. The sense of accomplishment is overwhelming right now.

26/3/15 - Oh.

This post is just oh.

Every time I fix one problem, another comes up. I think this video can explain it better than I can. I've no idea what the hell I've done here.

Help. 

23/3/15 - I owe you some progress

From my last post a few weeks ago, I've been trying to get things to work in Unity.

Here's what I've got so far!

And sweet baby jesus has this taken a long time to do.

I've had such a problem with sprites. I never would have guessed that would be my biggest problem.

My first problem was getting everything to slice nicely so I didn't get a jiggly frame without guesswork. With the help of Wayne Peters, a game art tutor, I've managed to get that bit down! Great!

Problem two was an issue with the code. I followed this tutorial, and for whatever reason, I could swear on my life code just kept appearing out of nowhere. Thankfully, I have my talented brother to help me see where I'm going wrong - hint: It was capital letters, lower case letters, wiggly brackets and semi-colons.

So! All coded up, and problem three is again an issue with the sprites. As you can see from the video, there's a nasty jump there between an idle animation and the run. I'd wager it's because the sprites aren't the same dimensions.

Either way, enjoy my progress and look out for more stuff. I might need to change that picture on the banner, I'm not going to have much hair left once this software has made me pull it all out.

10/3/15 - It's been a while, hasn't it?

Hi folks.
I've got nothing artsy to show for the minute, but I'd like to show you a few tutorials that I've been using to help me get to grips with Unity.

Sprite Sheet Generator - This was a pain in my side before I realised I could do this. I was struggling with how to turn my animation into a sprite sheet, as it's pretty easy to make sprites with a sprite sheet in Unity. I thought, well, instead of trying to put my .png sequence into a big sheet, surely there's a button. Hint: There is!

This is my crappy little box jump I'm playing with, and this is the sprite sheet it made.

Then, there's this tutorial I've been following, how to get my character into a controller. I think this might take a while, folks. Don't forget about me if I don't post!