Over the last few weeks in our Games Design sessions, we’ve been going over some of the things that will be needed to make our ongoing group project to create a ‘Vertical Slice’ of a game work. This has mainly been useful code and Unity processes that will enable us to create a point and click game that actually functions. While coding isn’t really my area of interest, and for the group project (which is documented here) I won’t be particularly involved in the design or code side of things, it’s still useful to learn these methods and to have some idea how to apply them in the future if needed. Specific things we’ve covered so far have been:
Point and Click
This first lesson was basically to help us establish the base functionality of our game. As we are required to create a point and click style game, we were shown how to set up character movement based on the position of an object that instantly moves to the location of a mouse click. In this way, the character always moves towards this invisible object, meaning that it appears to follow the location of the mouse click.
This function is the foundation of the gameplay of our project, so it was a useful start to the project.
Navmesh
The next session we were shown how to create a Navmesh, which would allow our characters to navigate our environments accurately and in the way we want them to.
This is another essential element for our project to work, so it was very helpful to learn how to create this kind of playability. With the navmesh, the character moves where you click on the blue surface, and connections can easily be made between separate areas, such as the ground level and higher ridge in the above image.
All of these functions take us closer to being able to put together a working point and click game as a group, and also give us a better understanding of a few of the minutia of putting together an indie game.
Matt Glen 