My first game in Unity

16 January 2022

For my first official "art" for this website, I've made a game in Unity.

Why?

Despite resigning from my job, I'm busier than ever in my notice period at the FT. As such, I don't have a lot of time or energy to focus on drawing/Blender. In order to keep up with some form of "art" I decided to use the programming skills I'm exercising and have learned a bit of Unity which also involves learning C#.

Unity is a pain

Unity is an absolute pain. To start with, Blender and Unity use different axes. In Blender, the z-axis is up. In Unity, the y-axis is up. The shortcuts are also irritatingly different. I don't know why I expected two pieces of software developed by two different companies to follow the same ideas, but I'm irritated nonetheless.

Add to that, Unity is not what I expected. I thought my 6+ years of professional programming experience would be a boon, but programming inside Unity is not what I expected at all. Although I can admit that C# sharp is new to me and that'll be part of it, the big barrier is the state of Unity help and documentation. Any time I get stuck I find myself looking at solutions from 2013 forum posts that don't work in 2021. Nothing seems particularly intuitive (yet?) so rather than be able to work it out for myself, I'm searching code accross all of GitHub to find a solution that works. It's a bit of a chore.

Cyoob

That said, I did manage to make something! I've been loosely following a GameDev.tv course and despite how frustrating I find Unity, I'm still enjoying the experience enough. My first game is called "Cyoob" and it's a simple obstacle course that you navigate with a cube whilst enemy cubes and spheres try and hit you. It's rudimentary, there is no win state but it's a little beefier than the GameDev.tv tutorial in that the player is visibly aware of the amount of times they crash into something, and all enemy objects appear at random times. It's a WebGL game and only works with a keyboard (WASD/arrow keys), I've published it on itch if you'd like to play: Cyoob.

I've no intention of becoming a game developer, but TransGameDev are doing a game jam next month and I wanted to see if I could learn enough to participate! I'm keen to try and make assets in Blender and export them into a game of my making.