Reflecting laser light in Unity

I am working these days in prototyping a simple puzzle game where the player needs to direct a laser beam towards a target using mirrors. The map should contain some obstacles that stops the light from moving forward.

To break down that problem we need first to write it in simple words. How do we reflect shoot the laser from a point and make it move and react to certain objects and reflect?

Lets break down the problem:

1. We need to have a start point of the laser. That point can be the object where the laser will be shot from.
2. We need to track the laser in the direction it is moving towards and see whether it will collide with an object or not.
3. If the laser hits an object tagged as a mirror, we need to do two things; we need to calculate the direction of the reflected beam, and we need to store the point of impact in the mirror as a point within the laser beam.
4. Repeat point 2, 3 and 4 until we either hit an object that is not a mirror, or not hit anything at all. If the laser does not collide with any thing, we will set its end point to be a point that is out of the screen bounds to give the illusion that the laser is shooting to infinity.

With that out of the way, lets examine the code. First, we will render the laser using the LineRenderer component, this will give us big fixability into drawing the line with multiple points. To make this super easy, I created a script and called it LaserBeam. This class does not inherit from MonoBehavior and its sole job is to calculate the points of the laser and draw it on the screen. I also decided to create the component using the code. Here are the variables of the class:

Figure 1: The variables used in the LaserBeam class

As you can see in figure 1, the most important variable is the List of laser indices this is where all the points of the line renderer will be store to draw the line on the screen.

Then, I created the class constructor that initializes the object and starts calculating the path of the laser.

Figure 2: The class constructor

The constructor initializes and adds the LineRenderer component into the game object and then calls the function CastLaser() that shoots the laser and calculates it path.

Figure 3: The CastLaser() function

As demonstrated in figure 3, the first thing we need to do is to store the current point we are at in the list of indices of the laser. At the very beginning that point will be the transform.position of the game object shooting the laser. They we need to create a ray starting from that position and shooting upward for the prototype the initial direction is transform.up because I want the laser to be shot upward. Then in the if statement, we do basic ray casting and we check what we hit. If we hit anything, we get into the CheckHit() function, if not, we add an index to a very far point and then draw the ray to give the illusion of shooter the laser to infinity.

The actual magic happens in the CheckHit() function; here is the code of the function:

Figure 4: CheckHit Function

The first thing we need to do is to know where we collided with. Did the laser collide with a mirror object or a wall. If the laser collided with a wall, we add the collision point as an index in the list and draw the laser and that’s it.

If the laser hits an object that is tagged as a mirror, then we need to calculate the new direction of the laser. Thankfully, and without getting into complex math, Unity provides a great function that reflects a vector off a plane defined by a normal. We already know the direction that we came from, and RaycastHit can provide the normal of the point where the laser collided. Using those two pieces of information we can calculate the new reflected direction using Vector3.Reflect(). So, we store the point of collision in the list of indices and then calculate the new direction using the Vector3.Reflect() function. Then we input the new point and the new direction and call CastLaser() again; and thus, we are recursively drawing the line. If you examine CastLaser() and CheckHit() functions you can see that the exit criteria from the recursion is either we hit a wall, or hit nothing at all.

The UpdateLaser() function is straight forward as we need to iterate through the entire list of indices and just add them all into the LineRenderer component. Unity will automatically draw the line for you once you add the indices.

Figure 5: The UpdateLaser Function

The laser game object it self contains a different script that inherits from MonoBehavior, that scripts destroys and creates the laser beam in every frame. With that, I have a functional reflection system that I can use in my game!

Figure 6: The reflection system in action

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June 2, 2021June 2, 2021 by samirgeorgy Categories: Devlogs, Game Development, GamingTags: Game Development, games, indiedev, made with unity Leave a comment

Creating cutscenes with Unity’s Timeline

One of the things that make video games amazing is the ability to tell and experience stories. You can make the player engage with the game’s protagonist; or have compassion on the game’s antagonist. Back in the days of PlayStation 1, I was fascinated by the idea of having cut scenes in the game. It never came into my mind that you can actually play some kind of movies in a game. I used to call those cartoons 🙂 For many years, the idea of telling epic stories in games has haunted my thought. The Call of Duty Modern Warfare trilogy were just brilliant in the way they tell the story during the loading screen. The amazing story of God of War and how you feel bad for Kratos and so many other games that tell breath taking stories. All of these experiences and stories are told during cutscenes! Back in school I used to make short films and visual effects using Adobe After Effects and I always dreamed of being able to do something like this but in video games. Today I am telling you that this dream came true, and I finally was able to create my first cutscene and story in a video game using Unity3D.

Making cutscenes in Unity has been an absolute thrill and it is all thanks to GameDevHQ’s amazing Cinematography course offer to its Pro members. For this project I used GDHQ’s Filebase. If you don’t know what Filebase is, then you are missing alot. Filebase is this insane library of assets for Unity that you can use to make games. They have everything that you can imagine, in AAA quality.

To start with, you have to have some kind of imagination to how the scenes will look like, what the environment is and how you want your camera’s to pan through the scene. This can be all found in the director’s note. Usually these notes imagine the scene through simple sketches along with camera movement guides. They put you on a starting position to getting the correct shots of you scene.

Figure 1: Director’s Notes of the entry scene

In the above image you can see that the director is plotting the entry scene of the level. The director wants the player character to glide down the rope and you can see in the notes and in the arrow that the camera should pan downwards. Then there should be a shot from a far showing the player dropping down in the dark corner of the room. From that point, the animators should start animating the scene a 3D software, export it to a format that Unity can understand and then it is time to import that animation clip into Unity. This is where the all the magic happens.

After importing the animation clip, you want to plan your shots, how do you know what shots to take and for how long? You guessed it, from the director’s notes. You want to do exactly as the director has intended. The first thing I did here is that I started planning for the shots. I creating multiple Virtual Cameras that are scattered across the scene.

Figure 2: Virtual Camera’s scattered in the scene

In figure 2 you can see the “CM” icons, these are all virtual camera positioned at a starting place where I want the camera to start panning from. The one that is selected above is the camera that pans down while the player character is gliding down the rope.

Figure 3: A director’s note of another shot

Figure 4: Another Virtual Camera for another shot in the same scene

Figure 4 is another shot taken from a different angle of the entry scene. Now when this shot is active, the player should be already on the ground and according to the director’s notes in figure 3. This is basically the approach that you want to take when planning out your shots before you start composing them. For each shot, I had a camera ready to be animated to give the panning effect desired by the director as shown in figure 5.

Figure 5: How the hierarchy looks like after adding all the camera for a scene

Now, Here comes the million dollar question; how do I compose the shot? How do I get all of these shots together and pan the camera. The first thought is that this has to be a very complex way and it would take days to compose only one shot in Unity. This is not the case in Unity. Unity has this module called Timeline which is an amazing tool to compose your shots, just like Adobe Premiere or Final Cut. IT IS THAT SIMPLE!

In figure 5, you can see a game object called Into_Cutscene. This object I added a Playable Director component. This component holds the timeline. From here, I referenced all the virtual cameras in the timeline and starting animating them just like any professional video editing software. You can see in figure 6 how the timeline looks like, and if you are a video editor, you will be able to relate to it alot!

Figure 6: Unity’s Timeline in action

In figure 6, you can see that we can control the camera movement through animation, we can control the audio as in music of voice over. I can also control other game objects in the scene! How awesome is that! After a scene is over, the game is triggered and the user can start controlling the player character.

Another thing that I did was to trigger cutscenes to play when the player reaches a certain point. I used a box collider, as demonstrated in figure 7, that I positioned in a scene and when the player enters that collider, it triggers the cutscene.

Figure 7: A box collider that triggers a scene.

The code to trigger the scene is the following:

public class GrabKeyCardActivation : MonoBehaviour
{
    public GameObject sleepingGuardCutScene;

    private void OnTriggerEnter(Collider other)
    {
        if(other.tag.Equals("Player"))
        {
            if (sleepingGuardCutScene != null)
                sleepingGuardCutScene.SetActive(true);

            GameManager.Instance.HasCard = true;
        }
    }
}

This is the approach that I used in creating cutscenes in the game. At the end, this is what I came up with:

Figure 8: The cutscene with the level

I have to say, working on this mini game has been an absolute thrill to me and I cant wait to start working on the stories that I want to tell!

March 18, 2021 by samirgeorgy Categories: Devlogs, Game Development, GamingTags: Game Development, games, indie games, Unity3D Leave a comment

A long time since…

It has been very long since I wrote a blog post that relates to this community. So, I will try to give a quick status update on what I am doing these days. After publishing Insanity on September 1st, 2020. I needed a break, so I took one full month off just to stop my brain from thinking or solving problems. It was well worth it. Now, as many of you may know, I am studying to enter a PMP exam by mid December. I am trying to get myself acquainted with project management in order to prepare myself for real life projects, whether they are personal, freelanced or even projects to studios if I get hired. My ultimate goal at for my game development journey is to become a creative director and direct the making of games. I already have, and still building, my technical expertise, so it won’t hurt to gain some management expertise as well. So wish me luck with that exam, please! I hate exams!!

I also won a grant that was offered by our government, where I attended the Game Design and Development Specialization offered by Michigan State University on Coursera for free. The specialization consisted of 5 courses:

1. Intro to Game Development
2. Principals of Game Design
3. Game Development on Modern Platforms
4. Entrepreneurship and the gaming industry
5. Capstone Project for graduation.

It was a great experience and I completed the program on October 5th 2020. I learned a lot from this specialization especially when it came to game design. It also gave me an opportunity to attend seminars to developers, producers, designers and creative directors from the industry who work at EA, Ubisoft, Activision and Rockstar. It was eye opening and I am so glad I got through this experience.

How Insanity is doing So far?

Since I published Insanity, I have proudly made $0.53 :D. I got 1000+ downloads for the game on android and around 200+ downloads in iOS which is fine, but I didn’t make money out of it. This is okay, I was not really expecting my first game to be a hit or anything. The main goal of making Insanity was for me to experience making games, to live the whole journey from start to finish; to actually get something done and published to the public. I did that; and this is more than enough for me at this stage. I am not a person who like to take big leaps, but I always believe in a slow and steady approach to doing things. Whether I win or lose in the Ultimate Game Jam, having to build a game and get it out there, is just the greatest reward that I can get at the moment.

So… What’s Next then?

After resting a bit from Insanity, I started planning for a new project. I worked with my cousin for some time to come up with an idea for a competitive online game. We had some really good ideas and we almost finalized a High Concept Document; but then something great happened to me three weeks ago…

A friend of mine who works at a company in Egypt, called me and she was interested in the games I make and she started asking me questions about how long have I been doing this and whether I am interested in doing professional game development work and I told her that I was open for anything; and this is when it happened. She offered me an opportunity to be outsourced and work on a project that they signed with the government to create a game that raises the kids and youth awareness against COVID-19 and how can they protect themselves from the virus and stop its spread. I found myself saying, YES! One week later, I signed an official contract to lead the design and development of the game; and an NDA of course. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to share much of the development journey, but I will sure share with you all some screenshots when things start to take shape. So far, we got the client’s approval on the game idea and we are now waiting for their approval on the High Concept Document. Once approved, I will start the technical design and jump into Unity and Visual Studio. I have never been that happy! Hard work is finally paying off!

Now, my current PC can barely run URP, imagine if I want to do something on HDRP. I remember when I did Al Heck’s course on making beautiful levels, doing the level in HDRP was painful because of the processing power of my PC. So I decided to build a new PC so I can work on, and at the same time play games as well. Here are the specs that I bought:

• CPU: AMD RYZEN 7 3700X 8-Core 16-Threads (Max Boost 4.4 GHz)
• Mother Board: GIGABYTE B550 AORUS PRO AC
• GPU: ASUS GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER ROG Strix 8GB GDDR6 Graphics Card
• RAM: HyperX Fury Desktop Memory Single Stick 16GB 3200 MHz
• SSD: Sabrent 512GB Rocket NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 Internal SSD High Performance Solid State Drive
• HDD: 1TB Seagate BarraCuda
• Case: XPG INVADER Mid-Tower PC Chassis Black
• PSU: Seasonic 620 Watt Bronze (Not the best Wattage, but it will do for now)
• Cooling: 3 CoolerMaster front intake fans, 1 XPG fan in the back as an exhaust, 1 XPG fan on the top as an exhaust. Cooler Master MasterLiquid ML240R Addressable RGB for CPU Cooling.

New PC Setup

At the end if I were to give anyone reading this post an advise. It is to never give up hope and just keep doing what yo are doing and always believe in yourself and in your dreams!

Cheers!

November 26, 2020December 2, 2020 by samirgeorgy Categories: Game Development, Gaming, Random Thoughts, TechnologyTags: Build, Game Development, games, Insanity, PC Leave a comment

The thrill of making my first video game!

I was always fascinated by video games. Not just by how fun they are, but also in the small details that make them what they are. I remember back in the days when I was young I used to play Super Mario Bros over and over again! I got so good at this game to the extent that I used to speed run the game and try to break my record every time. I didn’t have a stop watch back in the days so I used to start at the hour and see how long it will take me to finish the game end to end without any shortcuts! I was 6 or 7 years old back then!

Then after some time, I got my first PC, it was packed with games. I don’t really remember most of them but the games that consumed me were Quake and Doom. Oh, the thrill of seeing a 3D game for the first time; to me that was a miracle! Something out of this world! I always said to myself that this is it! Video games cannot get better than this. I would spend hours and hours playing these two games trying to finish them. Back in the days, we didn’t use the mouse to aim n the FPS games, it was all in the keyboard.

Then I got my PS1 and a whole new era of video games opened its arms to me! i never thought that you can tell a story in a video game! I remember player Resident Evil 3, Crash trilogy and other games that had some great stories! I would get very emotional because of how the story turns out or really frustrated at a character. From this moment, my love to video game was cemented!

I never saw myself as a person who would develop video games. I always thought that making these games was too complicated and advanced for me! I would always think to myself that I am no match to do things like that! I had some great stories to tell, and I do have the passion towards video games, but making them was not a thing that I would put myself through because I was afraid that I might fail. I had this thought because I took a computer graphics course back at school that was based on OpenGL and C++ and boy that was one tough course! I barely got out with a B, and I was proud of it! I couldn’t imagine myself going through all this again for making games!

In 2018 I discovered Unity; and after watching few tutorials, I saw that it was not that hard to make a game on that engine! I decided to give myself a chance and give it a try. I started with a course called “The Ultimate Guide to Game Development in Unity” that was offered in Udemy by Jonathan Weinberger and I found that it was not that hard. You just needed to understand the API of Unity and get used to it and things will start to click from there! I remember the feeling I had when I finished the space shooter game that was the product of that course. I was over the moon! I actually made my first video game. I shared this game with all my friends and they all didn’t believe that I actually made a video game. This is when I decided that this would be the kind of work that I want to do for the rest of my life.

Today I am working on developing my first video game, Insanity. I started working on this game earlier this year, and I am planning on participating in the Ultimate Game Jam with that game! Honestly, I do not care if I win or lose in this Game Jam. I do not care whether this game bring me a lot of money or not. I do not care if that game does not get viral. All I care about is that this is my first video game that I started on my own from scratch, and now it is published to the public. I finally made it; I finally was able to do something that I thought I would never do! Today I am preparing my game for its alpha version; and soon, the game will hit the market. I can’t be more thrilled than I am right now!

So, if you are reading this post right now and having these second thoughts; if you are being haunted by that thought that you are not good enough for this field, or does not have the knowledge to excel in it. Think again and read this post one more time! If you love the field and passionate about it, then my advice to you is to never give up on yourself!

 

Regards,

Samir Georgy

February 11, 2020March 1, 2020 by samirgeorgy Categories: Gaming, Random Thoughts Leave a comment

Devlog 4: Music Composition

Music is an essential part of any video game. They can change the mood of any scene drastically. You can have an intense scene full of action but if the music is not good enough, you may lose interest in whats going on. That’s why, in my opinion, right now, AAA studios spend a lot of money with top composers to get their music right. These days when you listen to a track, sometimes you cannot differentiate whether this is made for a movie or a video game.

When it comes to Insanity, music plays a crucial part of the player experience. I want the player to feel excited, I want the player to get that feeling of moving forward, to overcome all the obstacles to win the level. I want the pace of the game to be fast. I am not planning on showing any between level graphics like a player level performance rating or so, once the player is done with a level, I will get him/her right into the next one. There is no stop or pause. The music needs to convey this experience as well. I want the music to be fast, loud and when it comes to progression I want it to always have major notes, so it implants that feeling into the player that no matter how hard the level is, the player can still do it.

I worked with my cousin who is a great aspiring musician; his name is Karim Ibrahim, you can follow him on twitter by clicking here, or find some of his work on Anghami by clicking here. We spend hours and hours thinking about the main theme of the music. What I understood from him is that you need to pick a melody, a master melody and this should be the theme of the music of your entire game. You can them take that melody and do all kind of variations to it, but you need to stick to the main theme. I am not a musician so maybe I am having a little hard time explaining this; but think of Assassin’s Creed as an example. We all know the famous theme of Assassin’s Creed, and we have heard it in almost all the different releases of the game; but sometimes you hear the theme in acoustic guitar, sometimes you hear it in an orchestra, maybe in a rock progression. You can use that theme and incorporate it in any music genre you want. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out a good melody that we can use and follow through out the composition of the music; and we finally got there! It was really exciting for me to get that music recorded and ready.

We basically recorded two small tracks, one for the menu and another for the level. The rationale behind the menu music is that it should put you in the mood. It need to be a little but slow, but at the same time powerful enough to prepare you for the challenges ahead. We thought of having a basic percussion of a drum kick followed by a clap, maybe to give a feeling of encouragement to the player to what is yet to come! So the pace of the menu music would be a little slow, but the pace of the levels will be fast, this would put a good contrast, I guess, so that if the player switches back to the menu, things will get a little bit less intense.

I have to say when we finished recording the menu music and I added it into unity, the feeling I had was just priceless. The game started to have its own identity. It started to have its own unique feeling. To be honest, this experience has been one of the greatest experiences in my life so far and I am so thankful that my game has reached this stage. I will leave you here with a small snippet of what we did.

February 2, 2020 by samirgeorgy Categories: Devlogs, Gaming, Insanity Leave a comment

Devlog 3: Insanity’s Experience

One of the things that I was thinking about when i was working on my game is its experience. Any good game, in my opinion has to make the player feel something. Some games make their players feel powerful, smart, afraid, sad or even angry! I remember playing a game called I AM BREAD… Oh, that game made me want to find the developer that made it and just punch him/her in the face! But that what makes a game good, in my opinion; even if not a lot of people like it.

So, what do I want the player to feel when playing Insanity? I want the game to be challenging, fun and at the same time to make the player feel unstoppable. Now, the important question is: how can I convey this feeling to the player? The first thing that I thought of was the Music. Music can set the mood for any game. It can turn a glorious winning scene into the saddest scene you have even seen. For now, I am using the Mjolnir mix track for Halo 2; it is fast, using high keys and the progression of the music makes you feel that you just want to keep going forward. Now, I cannot just use that track in the game I am planning to release, but this track helped me in knowing what kind of music I want to include in my game. I want the music to be badass!

What else can I do to enhance the experience of my game? The Controls? Of course… the simpler and more efficient and responsive the controls are to the player, the smoother the game is, and the player will focus more on the game rather than having understand a complex controlling system (of course that case if for Mobile gaming). At first I was thinking of just using a joystick and put it on the left of the screen and the jump button would be on the right; something like Pubg’s controls. But I thought that this will be too complicated for my game; besides, the player will never have to do upwards or downwards in the game. So I decided to create the control system in buttons. A button that you press so the player moves forward and another for backward movement and a jump button. The movement buttons are close to each others to make movement for the player easy. The jump button is located to the left as most players have a muscle memory of jumping using the right hand.

The controls of insanity at the bottom of the screen.

The plan for Insanity goes beyond music and controls, but also through game play. The player has to finish the whole game before he/she can unlock two additional modes for the game:

1. Time Trial: Where the player can select a level and do it within his/her time. The player can break his/her own record by playing the level again and finishing it in less time.
2. Insanity Mode: The ultimate mode of Insanity. This mode’s challenge is to finish the whole game in a single run. Which means that you have only one health point through out the game. If you die at any level, you restart the game from level 1.

I am thinking of incorporating the game with Google play games, and introduce trophy system to the game in order to make the game more rewarding to the player, but I need to think about it. Not sure if this will be available in version 1.0

For now, these are my thoughts when it comes to the Insanity Experience. I am sure, I will come up with more ideas along the way; after all, this is my first game ever. and I can’t wait to get it released!

January 20, 2020January 29, 2020 by samirgeorgy Categories: Devlogs, Gaming, InsanityTags: 2d, Game Development Projects, gamedev, Gaming, Insanity, platformer, unity Leave a comment

Devlog 2: Level Design

One of the challenges I had when creating the levels is art. It is a skill that I am working on improving but at the same time I need to be productive and take a fast run in order to finish the game on time. I had to find a solution that can make my life a bit easier when it comes to the arts.

To start, I used the sprites that Jonathan used in his course “The Ultimate Guide to Mobile Game Development” and I used the skills I learned in that course to build a tile-map for the first level. Now I have a simple level where I used the dungeon sprites that were provided in that course. Then I decided to build another level with the same tileset, but I was thinking that I shouldn’t have all the levels having the same dungeon-y theme. I need to create levels with variable themes so that levels won’t be boring.

Level 2 of Insanity

Thankfully a friend of mine, who is a graphic designer, referred me to a website called Freepik. This website has a big set of sprites that you can use to build your own 2D game varying from 2D characters with their animations to tilesets to GUI items and a lot more. Basically what I did is that I downloaded almost all the tilesets from that website and I had to find my way through Adobe Illustrator to extract those tiles, make a sprite sheet with the correct sizes so I can slice them properly in Unity and create the tilemaps. I have to admit, the results turned out to be great! So if you are a game developer who is not good at art like me, I recommend that you use this website as a good start.

Then it came the time to decide which traps should I implement to make the game challenging and at the same time fun. The idea that I have is that I wanted the player to advance through the game bit by bit. I don’t want level one to have tough traps and tricky jumps, otherwise, the player will get bored from the game; but rather, let’s start with an easy level and get tougher the more the player advances through the game. The traps that I am initially thinking about are the following:

1. Spikes (of course)
2. Circular Saws (stationary and moving).
3. Fire (bring the heat!)
4. tracking missiles? (not yet sure whether I should include this or not.)

When it comes to the behavior of those traps, I tried as much as I could to make the behavior of those traps modular. So basically I have built a universal class called TrapDamageBehavior. This class is responsible for killing the player if it collides with the trap. This class can work with any trap that I can think of. Now some of those traps are not stationary. For example, The Circular Saws tend to move back and forth in their tracks at the level. For this scenario, I wanted to do some OOP. Basically, I have created a generic parent class called MovableObject that Inherits from MonoBehavior. Here is its code:

public class MoveableObject : Monobehavior
{
    #region Private Protected Variables

    /// <summary>
    /// The object's point A
    /// </summary>
    [SerializedField] protected Transform pointA;

    /// <summary>
    /// The object's point B
    /// </summary>
    [SerializedField] protected Transform pointB;

    /// <summary>
    /// The movement speed
    /// </summary>
    [SerializedField] protected float _movementSpeed;

    #endregion
}

This class has two points, A and B, where the object can move between and a movement speed variable. Now I can create another class called OscillatingMovement that defines the movement of any object that needs to move between two points. That class will inherit from MovableObject and use points A and B and the movement speed variable. This class has a function called Movement where the object is moved from one point to another back and forth. The code of the function is this:

public void Movement()
{
    //positionToMoveTo is initialized in start to pointA

    transform.position = Vector3.MoveTowards(transform.position, positionToMoveTo.position, _movementSpeed * Time.Deltatime);

    if (transform.position == pointA.position)
        positionToMoveTo = pointB;
    else if (transform.position == pointB.position)
        positionToMoveTo = pointA;
}

I was able to use this class to move all the circles saw traps as well as the moving platforms in my game; I even used the same class to move the level target which is the gem in the same manner. All that I have to do is to reference PointA and PointB for any moving object in the scene and define a movement speed and the object will move between Point A and B right away. The reason why I thought of building the movement of those objects in this way is that I am trying as much as I can to reuse the parent class with multiple objects. For example, If I am to implement the missile that I may need to create a child class that only uses point A for example as a spawn point and point B be the player last location upon spawning and the missile can then move towards point B but not in an oscillating movement but rather a one-directional movement.

There is still a lot to consider and to think about when it comes to the traps and I also see opportunities for optimization; but for now, this is how I approached my trap behaviors.

January 17, 2020April 22, 2020 by samirgeorgy Categories: Devlogs, Gaming, InsanityTags: development, Devlog, Game, Gaming, Insanity, passion, unity Leave a comment

Devlog 1: Insanity

Hello, and welcome to my devlog where I will be documenting my journey in developing my first game, Insanity.

Insanity is a mobile 2D platformer game that is inspired by a game called Super Meat Boy. I am planning to publish it to the play and app stores by the end of 2020. At the beginning I had no idea what game I should be doing. I downloaded some free assets from the asset store and tried to build my own Third Person Controller, then I tried to animate that character and play around with it, but I didn’t really have a solid idea that I can work on from the beginning and take it all the way to release. At that time I was playing Super Meat Boy, and i thought… why not start with something similar to it. 2D and 3D Development are pretty much the same with few differences as per my knowledge with Unity so far. So I decided to start with developing a 2D Platformer game similar to Super Meat Boy but for mobile.

I developed my first level in that game and experimented with the character controller to try to make the player move. Thanks to the course “The Ultimate Guide to Mobile Game Development” that Jonathan Weinberger offered on Unity, I got familiar with tilemaps and with the basics of level design for mobile games, and this is where it all started. I had my notebook with me all the time to write down any idea that I may have for that game. The game is supposed to challenge the player where he/she has to go through multiple levels with obstacles and traps and make it all the way to collect the sacred gem in each level. When I first thought about Insanity, I thought that it should include the following:

1. Lots of traps that the player has to overcome.
2. Power ups that can help the player overcome some complex traps easily. The power ups that I thought about so far are an ability to dash and freeze time for the environment.
3. The game should give the player a feeling of having to push forward. So the over all atmosphere of the game is drive the player forward to try and pass all the levels.
4. The music should convey that feeling to the player. For now I am using as a pilot the soundtrack of Halo. I still need to work on its soundtracks, but this will do for now.

When you unlock all the levels the game will unload a mode called “Insanity Mode” where the player is challenged to finish the whole game in a single run. No checkpoints, no lives, no mercy. If the player dies, he/she has to start the game all over from the beginning. I am not sure yet if this is a good idea to make or not, but I guess things will be clearer towards the end of development.

One of the levels in Insanity

One of the challenges that I have when developing this game is the art. When it comes to art, and designing good looking environments and animations I am not that skilled, so i tried as much as I can to get myself comfortable with Photoshop. I also found a great website where you can file some really good tilesets that you can use in your 2D game. The website is www.freepik.com you can find a lot of good sprites over there.

I am also using Unity Advertisements to play ads to the player. I will be talking more about the my approach towards the ads in later posts.

So far I have built only 4 levels, and I keep on expanding on the game’s features. Once I finish all the features that I have planned, I will continue on creating more levels.

Level selection menu in Insanity

I will be sharing more insights on my development journey of Insanity. If you like to give it a try, you down download the apk file from this link and give it a try. This is an initial version just to test how things are going when building it for android. Go ahead… Give it a try!

January 16, 2020January 29, 2020 by samirgeorgy Categories: Devlogs, Gaming, InsanityTags: development, Game, Gaming, Insanity, Mobile, passion, unity, Unity 3D Leave a comment

First FPS game!

As many have noticed, these days I started to learn game development. Through the last course that i took I learned the basics of Unity; I learned how to make 2D games as well as 3D games.

One of the projects that i worked on during the course was to create a 3D First Person Shooter (FPS) game. All the models imported into the project were created by Unity artists; so all i did was just the programming and the logic for the game.

I am pleased to share with you my first FPS game. you can download it from the link below and try it out. Feel free to leave a comment about the game.

Sci-Fi Shooter Game

June 7, 2018January 29, 2020 by samirgeorgy Categories: GamingTags: first, games, Gaming, person, shooter, unity Leave a comment

First Game Development Certificate

Hello Everyone! Today I am excited to share with you an important piece of news.

Today I got my first game development certificate. I finally started to pursuit my dream of becoming a game developer and this is step one. As i mentioned in my previous post, when it comes to video games, my passion just over grows me. I love video games; I love playing them, and i love making them.

This course was an introductory course to Unity engine where it teaches you the basics on have to make some good games. I will continue on expanding my knowledge to this field until i reach my ultimate goal 🙂

June 3, 2018January 29, 2020 by samirgeorgy Categories: GamingTags: Game Development Projects, Gaming, passion, unity Leave a comment