End of Week 11 02/02/25

Your boy got sick near the end of the week, so a little delay on the blog. Sorry about that. And I hate to disappoint you again, but there is little to report. Another full week of Unity down, I am feeling more and more confident that game design is accessible. I think I always overcomplicated it in my head. When I was little, I was dazzled by games like Uncharted 4, amazed at the amount of work I imagined went into it. I remember having Super Mario 64 on my Wii U and one time my dad drawing a comparison between it and Uncharted. He said the reason Mario looked “boxy” was because he was made of “triangles.” He said Nathan Drake was just made of way more triangles than Mario. Of course then I imagined a game dev piecing Drake together triangle by triangle. Ha ha. With those kinds of misconceptions, I guess I imagined game design to be this genius level thing only, well, geniuses could do. As I go through the tutorials, at least so far, I come away thinking “this is it?” I realize there is much going on in the back end that IS complicated, but on the surface, piecing together a simple 3D scene is not rocket science. I now know why games are so expensive to make though. I am running basic unity scenes on my mac and it is very low quality. GTA 4 would take 4,000 macs.

I have learned some cool skills on unity. Sound design is intuitive. You can attach sound origin points to a scene, then change the volume of those points and change the sound from 2d to 3d (a flat sound vs one that responds to environment and fades with distance). It is also made easy to include theme music through a free library offered by Unity or from your own library. Unity makes it easy to create player objects to interact with a scene. The “camera,” or sight while playing, can be moved and rotated to change point of view. You can set a point of view and attach the camera to an object so that it will rotate and move with the object while remaining at its level. The object, or “player,” can be moved at different speeds, rotation speeds, and weights. It can be granted a “rigid body” component to hit other object and create realistic collisions. You can create “collectibles” to be obtained by the player that will disappear or create animations upon contact. These are game basics, but they add up to create immersion. A game like Bully is just a large combination of these immersion factors arranged in a symphony. This level of immersion though, as previously mentioned, would require a much more powerful computer (set of computers). An eye opening week.