Sneaky little Trickster Darren!
Today I focused on completing the Coin Distraction section along with the Security Cameras. Using the right mouse click to drop the coin was straightforward enough and so was adding the animation and the sound. Where I had some challenges however was that the coin would end up where I click and sometimes that would be stuck up in the air. Going forward in the course Jonathan did not touch on this and I could not tell if he had the same issue but I did some playing around with the Unity settings in the inspector and I decided to add a Rigidbody and enable Gravity on the coin. The net result was actually quite cool as now you can see the coin drop down to the ground instead of just appearing in a spot.
Feeling quite happy with my discovery I continued on with the animations but did not like that the animation played after the coin sound played, seemed out of sync. I did not want to go in and create a whole coroutine to delay the sound effect so I tried something first; I just sped up the animation 2x to see if that looked better. Fortunately for me speeding up the animation actually made it line up better with when the sound plays. Not perfect but close enough for this training exercise.
After working on the coin, I decided to take a breather from the challenges and watch a 2 hour Unity tutorial on Youtube. It was pretty basic but it was nice to refresh my memory on a few things and I did also learn quite a few new functions in Unity that I had not utilized before.
In the afternoon I tacked the Security Cameras section. It was a lot of fun animating the cameras and setting the cameras to detect Darren. At this point I started to feel like the game was coming to life.
Between the cutscenes, the player and enemy movement & AI completed, the voice overs, the coin toss event and the animated security cameras the Stealth Game was feeling like the real deal. Even though I completed 80% of the game coursework so far , I do recognize that my input in the game is probably closer to 20% or even less when you consider the time and effort that must have been invested in creating all the assets, animations, lighting, etc. for the game.
I am very impressed with how diverse each of the learning projects are in the GameDev Curriculum. Each one focusing on teaching us different concepts in C# or Unity. I feel confident that once I go through all 12 courses at GameDev that I will be empowered to do create anything. In fact I feel fairly confident that I can already create my own game from scratch because of how well GameDev has taught us to research and breakdown the logic of Unity and C# for whatever task is needed.
Mahalo!
