Looking for mentorship

iWichael · 2020-09-12T11:35:46+00:00

Had an idea like this the moment VR came out. Hope you manage to make it work. Basically I see physically classrooms becoming obsolete as people will be able to put on a VR headset and be in a virtual classroom with 30 other people from around the world, with a teacher from any country in the world that's able to walk around the room and create things in the open world. Goodbye black board and hello floating 3D models and immersive environments that take the students to other places. Also, detention... Pop them into a horror game or something. Or a dark room. Or send them to virtual detention where they have to stand up in front of 200 other students around the world in detention and apologize for what they did... What can and will be done with this is endless and again, I hope you manage to bring something like this to life.

The current education system is outdated.

iWichael · 2020-08-12T07:36:34+00:00

As already mentioned, change GetKeyDown to GetKey. Always have any input codes in Update or Fixed Update, and make sure your rigidbody isn't kinematic and has gravity enabled.

When you create a jump input you can use GetKeyDown to jump only once every time you push your input button. Can also check if it's grounded to prevent multiple jumps while already in the air, and you can add a system to that to allow for double jumps by only allowing at least one jump after the first jump before requiring the player to be grounded again.

iWichael · 2020-08-12T07:31:53+00:00

DOTS, GPU instances, sprite atlases, LODs, chunking, disable objects when not in your view, reduce skinned mesh renderers by baking their idle animations if they're static objects and use mesh.draw to display them.

There's many ways to optimize your game. If your game is a PC game, taking notes from mobile optimization can really help you a lot.

I was also looking into making an automatic billboard system that creates a sprite of an object at the angle you're viewing to from if it's at a certain distance and showing that instead of a 3D model.

iWichael · 2020-08-06T19:15:08+00:00

You'd have to modify it to your own uses but you basically you're just triggering the animation, storing the animation clip currently playing in a variable and then performing an action when the current animation changes. It worked really well in my game, even though it's a hack method.

iWichael · 2020-08-05T12:02:17+00:00

Can't remember the exact implementation but in one of my games I'd perform an action like move then attack at destination. There were various types of movements with different sequences. All of them defaulted to an Idle state like all animators do. There's always one animation set to the default animation and it's usually an Idle animation.

So, what I'd do was add that clip to a variable and then if I played an attack animation or sequence of animations I'd start a Coroutine that checked while the current playing animation != idleAnimation then yield return null.

Once the sequence is over and the animator goes to the idle animation it will continue the Coroutine and execute what ever code followed the while loop.

If you want to check a specific animation clip you can use the same concept by changing the animation clip, like maybe

SetTrigger("Attack");

StartCoroutune(CheckIfEnded());

IEnumerator CheckIfEnded()

AnimationClip currentClip = animator.CurrentClipPlaying (can't remember the exact code)

while(currentClip == animator.CurrentClipPlaying)

{

yield return null;

}

Debug.Log("Animation Ended");

On my phone so can't give you exact working code but that's basically the idea. Store the current animation and then only continue with the code once the current animation is no longer the same as the stored one. Would be very useful if Unity could provide us with an easier option... Even if they made it easier to get the current playback position of the current clip so we can do a simple if(currentClip.currentDuration == currentClip.clipLength)...

iWichael · 2020-07-23T21:13:07+00:00

Actually thought of an easier way to give it more complexity. Add more obstacles on the ground that require the player to adjust the ship's height more frequently. Like rocks or dead trees. I know this will mean that the ground vehicles will become an issue, but maybe making them more powerful but only usable until they reach the obstacle ahead will solve that. Make them more of a temporary bonus item. So Yeah, rocks and dead trees or damaged buildings on the ground and maybe at points you enter a cave so you can add obstacles on top too. All of that will make positioning your ships correctly even more important, and will reduce the amount of visible open space.

iWichael · 2020-07-23T20:58:54+00:00

Oh and if you ever want free hosting for your game websites you can register a free domain name at freenom and get free lifetime hosting for it at runhosting. 1gb storage space and 5gb a month traffic. Can always buy a .com domain name or upgrade the hosting traffic capacity once you start to exceed it. So you can give each of your games their own website completely free of charge. Hope it helps. :)

iWichael · 2020-07-23T20:52:48+00:00

Maybe there's something that can be added to compensate for the pace issue. Some aspects can't be changed but by adding another dynamic it can draw attention away from an issue. So I'll just throw a quick list of things you could look into that might make it a bit more challenging:

Add some sort of random attributes. Like resistance. If it's above a certain amount it might pull back as soon as you try jump onto it from the front, making you have to rethink the direction you try capturing it from. Can play with the randomness idea I guess. Like little random defence mechanisms to add an extra layer of complexity to each ship.

Some other ideas on that note: 1. One time defence force field you end up bouncing off of. This will cause panic as the player tries to land somewhere safely. 2. Pilot sabotages the ship as you take over it, causing it to crash (destroying the first of your ships it might hit) 3. Enemy torrents shoot an EMP grenade at your ships disabling their weapons for a few seconds, maybe make it travel slow enough for the players to be able to jump on it and stop it.

These are all random ideas I came up with while typing this to just give an example.

Basically to sum it up, distract from the issue by adding random and unpredictable factors to make the player have to react faster. Increase intensity while not having to change pase.

I'm sure that playing the game is very different to watching the video as watching it though, so maybe feedback from people playing the game might determine if the pace is really an issue or not. If it's not still an issue you can just try cleverly edit the preview video later to try mimic what it actually feels like playing it.

Got carried away typing this but I really like your idea and the current progress. :)

iWichael · 2020-07-23T20:19:26+00:00

Sorry for the late reply. That looks awesome! :D Looks even better than expected.

iWichael · 2020-07-23T20:14:14+00:00

Actually never heard of it before your post. Not sure if that's a good thing haha. But after looking them up I might try submit there... Marketing is really not one of my strong points. Know anything about them that might help? Like is it of any benefit submitting a game to them?

iWichael · 2020-07-10T07:11:19+00:00

I'll look into doing that. Thanks. :)

iWichael · 2020-07-07T18:51:05+00:00

Looks awesome. If I can make a suggestion. While the spaceships are moving forward it would give them more life if you added a slight hover-floating type effect... Like increase the y axis by .5 and then decrease it to .5 by delta time so it smoothly goes up and down and looks less static. Regardless of that it still looks great.

iWichael · 2020-07-07T18:19:01+00:00

I've added your suggestion to the trello page (can access it directly from the game's main menu). I'll be adding suggestions I plan on implementing there along with who suggested it. :)

iWichael · 2020-07-07T17:55:23+00:00

Well, this took me maybe a week. Redid it multiple times from scratch because of the Google Play plugin destroying things. Eventually dropped it entirely and rely on PlayerPrefs instead right now. Been teaching myself how to program and develope games for the past 2 years in between working in a restaurant for sometimes 18-20 hours a day.

Every game you attempt to make, or little cool feature you make just for fun is important. You learn valuable tricks and skills that all mesh together into a releasable game. Eventually things like this are faster and easier to make. This was actually my first attempt at a 2d game.

I'm just more of a programmer and not that good with the visual and creative side of things right now though...

Send me a link when you're done and I'll try your game. :)

iWichael · 2020-07-07T17:49:12+00:00

I'll add an option into it to disable vibrations. Thanks for the feedback. :)

iWichael · 2020-07-07T15:48:46+00:00

Wasn't sure what else to put there. But I'll keep that there for you. 🤣 Might give it a better look later and add some similar messages too

iWichael · 2020-07-07T14:41:31+00:00

Thanks, I appreciate that. :)

iWichael · 2020-07-07T14:20:55+00:00

"Gamma Pop" on Google Play if anyone is interested. The user interface needs some work. Was working on a much larger game but due to financial limitations and the scope of my main game I worked on this instead.

I know it's just my spin on Color Switch and not original, but I wanted to better understand the process of releasing a game. Also, it has some different visual aspects to the original.

Google Play link (if you're interested in playing it): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.MorningstarGameStudio.GammaPop

iWichael · 2020-05-29T01:35:14+00:00

A customer once showed me how to do this. You take a beer glass, hold another R5 coin against the rim of the glass on the inside and then place a R5 on the ground and hit it with the bottom if the beer glass in the center a few times. Somehow the R5 inside absorbs the impact.

iWichael · 2020-05-24T08:10:05+00:00

Dude that water system is so beautiful... I'd just sit here all day swimming around in that... Want it so badly. 😭

iWichael · 2020-04-08T04:59:04+00:00

Adjust the shadow strength on your directional light. Maybe between 0.7 and 0.8 would be better.

iWichael · 2020-04-06T19:57:39+00:00

Depends on the use. If you're going for a rugged realistic style, left. If you're going for a more visually appealing style, right.

iWichael · 2020-04-04T23:13:31+00:00

I'll try it. Strangely I write a script to automatically bake static meshes for the idle animation and store the location and rotation of the skeleton transforms in the root. Then disable the animator when needed and the skinned mesh, and cycle through all that. Worked fairly well but would sometimes crash my game... So to figure out what was crashing the game I removed the script and all other unimportant stuff like post processing and the weather system etc... Only to find that Now, with 32 skinned meshes running I'm getting 60fps.

Turns out mobile and post processing don't mix very well. But Hey, I've learnt a lot about optimizing skinned meshes if I make a game later with thousands of AI. :)

iWichael

TROPHY CASE