Day 4–10/72/20
Today, was a very good day! I started the day off by going over some of the survival guide chapters and it really helped take off some of that overwhelmed feeling from yesterday. As I mentioned yesterday, I had been introduced to a lot of new functions and terminology in unity and C#, so much to the point of feeling a little overwhelmed. So I stuck to the plan I made yesterday which was to start incorporating more of the survival guide into my daily routine, and I must say it definitely helped take the edge off a lot! So to any of my fellow interns, if you are feeling overwhelmed with all the new material I highly recommend reviewing the survival guide as Jon has some great challenges that build up throughout the chapter.
My Progress on the Space Shooter!
I feel like I am finally making progress as I am no longer flying a cube around shooting mini capsules at other cubes. I now have a program that is starting to actually resemble a game and in only 4 days! Unfortunately, I didn’t take screenshots of the game before today so no real way to see the comparison but if you want just imagine the lasers as little blue pill-sized capsules and the space ships as big blocky cubes flying around and you’ll get a pretty accurate idea of what the program looked like before today.
Anyways, I have also started to incorporate power-ups such as the triple shot laser and a speed boost into the program and will be working on a couple more power-ups tomorrow!
Blockers!
Didn’t run into too many problems today, other than figuring out how to import the filebase assets into unity and a little problem with my 2 side lasers when using the triple shot.
Most of my problems with filebase came because I couldn’t remember my login but the 2 lasers had me stumped. For the longest time today my 2 side lasers did not want to cooperate as they were different sizes from my main laser and also were traveling much slower. I checked through all the code to make sure all the lasers were identical, and they were. This left me even more stumped as to why they weren’t looking like the main laser. Anyways I continued on and figured I’d come back to it later so I just continued testing my program with the awkward slow lasers.
After the gym, I came back to try to tackle the problem and realized that there was one feature I had not looked at yet… the z-axis of the lasers. I completely passed over the z-axis as I was quadruple checking the code and the x and y positions of my lasers. Fingers crossed, I changed the z-axis to 0 from some random number (no idea how these got there), and voila! My lasers are now the same size and travel at the same speed as my main laser. I felt like an idiot after realizing that was the problem all along but at the same time relieved to have figured it out. So anyway, I guess where I am going with this, is that sometimes the problem is much less complicated than you think. While I was overthinking and digging through the code the answer was right in front of me in the objects transform.
To end the blog, I am just going to list some of the functions I really want to get more familiar with and understand the exact logic behind these functions, some simple, some a little more complex.
Functions to improve upon:
Vector3
Instantiate
Coroutine
IEnumerator
