In week 5, I looked at a couple of in-program tutorials. The first was the Karting microgame. It helped familiarise me with the basic tools in Unity and how to publish a game. I also looked at the FPS microgame. It was also useful, this time teaching me more about moving the camera around in the scene view. While these tutorials were useful, they still didn’t really give me a good place to start.

Figure 1: Karting Microgame Preview (Unity 2023)

I asked a classmate where he started and he said he did player movement first, so I searched and found this tutorial (Stuart’s Pixel Games) on how to do simple 2D Top-Down movement. I copied the following code into a player script:

Rigidbody2D body;

float horizontal;
float vertical;

public float runSpeed = 20.0f;

void Start ()
{
   body = GetComponent<Rigidbody2D>(); 
}

void Update ()
{
   horizontal = Input.GetAxisRaw("Horizontal");
   vertical = Input.GetAxisRaw("Vertical"); 
}

private void FixedUpdate()
{  
   body.velocity = new Vector2(horizontal * runSpeed, vertical * runSpeed);
}

Figure 2: Player Movement Code (Stuart’s Pixel Games n.d.)

Once I put it in and attached it to a player game object with a rigid body, I noticed the player was drifting downwards. I simply had to zero the gravity value from the RigidBody2D and I now had basic movement.

Figure 3: Player Movement in my Project on Unity

For the final task this week, I decided to implement a feature that looked easy to do: changing colours with a key press. This is essentially broken down to a key press event, and then switching between multiple predetermined values. The two common ways to do the latter are either using a switch statement or going with a hash table approach, such as using key value pairs to determine the next value to switch to. I chose to do the latter as it looks tidier in my opinion and is something I’m more familiar with.

The Unity scripting reference API was useful in finding the information out. The pages GetKeyDown Event and Colors provide the information to create the function, while TutorialsTeacher provided information on C# dictionaries, which help with the organization.

    public Color activeColor;
    private SpriteRenderer render;
    private Dictionary<Color, Color> colorChange = new Dictionary<Color, Color>();
    public Color colorWhite = new Color(1f, 1f, 1f);
    private Color colorGreen = new Color(0.25f, 1f, 0.25f);
    private Color colorRed = new Color(1f, 0.25f, 0.25f);
    private Color colorBlue = new Color(0.25f, 0.25f, 1f);

 void Start()
    {
        ColorChangeSetUp();
    }


  void ColorChangeSetUp()
    {
        colorWhite.a = 0.75f;
        activeColor = colorWhite;
        render = GetComponent<SpriteRenderer>();
        colorChange = new Dictionary<Color, Color>
        {
            { colorWhite, colorGreen },
            { colorGreen, colorRed },
            { colorRed, colorBlue },
            { colorBlue, colorWhite }
        };
    }
    void Update()
    {
        if (Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.R))
        {
            if (colorChange.TryGetValue(activeColor, out Color newColor))
            {
                activeColor = newColor;
                render.color = newColor;
            }
        }
     }

Figure 4: Player Colour Switching Code

The tricky parts were trying to get the right colours to display. It took me a while to learn how to generate custom colours using the “new Color” constructor.

Figure 5: Player Color Switching in my Unity project.

Next week, I will look at making a very basic working game.