My first Game with Unity

Motivation

During most of my work life with software development, I have mainly just worked with web development, that being either frontend or backend development. It’s quite easy to get settled down in an area and not explore further, but that’s not what I want for myself.

Last year (2018), I decided to sign up to a Open University course of Aalto University about C++ Programming (hopefully more details on this in a future blog post). In order to complete the course, me and a group decided to make a game based on Sid Meier’s Civilization, which was a lot of fun. There I could improve my C++ skills and also how to use SFML. The only problem was that for newcommers, we could not focus so much on the gameplay itself but had to focus on learning how to use the framework.

So that’s when I heard about Unity.

Unity

As described on their own website, Unity is a game development platform. This means that there are tons of things ready made to allow the game developer, in this case me, to focus on the game.

Since I had no prior experience with it, I decided to buy and watch the Udemy Course (Complete C# Unity Developer)[https://www.udemy.com/unitycourse/] and I cannot recommend it more. The course itself has more than 30 hours of content where the instructors teach how to build around 6 big projects. Altough they build some projects, it’s recommended that each person add their own features to the projects so that they can be unique. On this post I’ll show what I did for the 3rd project: Block Breaker.

Block Breaker

The idea of a Block Breaker game is, as the name suggests, to break blocks. This project was very useful in order to learn how to use Unity’s physics engine, where we can create rigid bodys, have gravity applying force to it, and also deciding what happens when two bodies collide. It’s so helpful to just think about what should be done when a colision happen and not code what and how a collision can happen!

After learning how to make the game, Unity also allow it to build and export it up to 25 platforms, such as iOS, Android, PS4, Nintendo Switch and more. One other key feature is to export to WebGL format, which allow browsers to run the game. And this the game you can see and play bellow.

On this game there are 5 different levels and almost each level has different style of blocks. Some blocks might break after a single collision, some might need three hits and there are also unbreakable blocks, which add some dynamic to the level creation.

So try it out my game and give me some feedback if possible on what I could improve 👾

Hope you had fun!