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https://redninja83882493.wordpress.com/2022/09/20/hard-drive/

Hard Drive

Posted on September 20, 2022 by Mr Chalk

Mobile games

This is a quick reflection on my latest project Hard Drive. I’ll just try to go through the steps that helped me finish the game. First of all, I have been trying to make games that work on mobile devices for a while with mixed success, so I signed up for an online course from GameDev.tv by Nathan Ferrer to get some guidance. One of the projects was a driving game, which is the foundation for this project.

Publishing 

I learned that publishing to Android is a lot easier and cheaper than with Apple, but for now I really just wanted to get a game to work on mobile via a browser on Itch, so that friends to play test it. Every time it comes to publishing, things seem to go a bit funny with the layout and controls. This time though the game ‘works’ on Apple phones at least, despite a warning saying otherwise.

Play testing

Through play testing I understood that the game didn’t work on all devices. For now, the issue seems to be my Android phones, but I could be wrong. It was also suggested that I put some statues in the game in order to send it to the Venice Biennale! Not sure what that would involve, but I managed to put some statues in and it actually came out alright! I think. I can’t make complex 3D models in Blenderyet, so I used Unity’s asset store and found a free one. Thanks to Chamferbox studio! 

Art and Light

The rest of the game environment is just made with basic 3D objects; cubes, capsules, and cylinders. I’m quite into minimal polygon shapes though, it reminds me of some early gaming experiences. Games like Doom, Descent, and especially Dark Side. I added some basic materials to the objects and then some spotlights to the front and back of the vehicle for effect.

Tricks

Decompression Fallback

One trick in Unity that helped the game run in the browser was the Decompression Fallback tick box in Publishing settings. Thank you Unity Documentation!

Rotation

Another crafting way to animate orbiting planets was to rotate one and then set others as children. I’m started to appreciate elegant solutions to game design challenges. I was going to animate them all… Thank you for saving me some time Ketra Games! This was all the code needed: 

public float rotationSpeed;

transform.Rotate(new Vector3(0, rotationSpeed, 0) * Time.deltaTime);

Sound

There are two audio sources in the game from TheWrongJohn, one at the start point and one hidden in two distant locations. 

The audio listener is on the vehicle, which means the sound will change depending on speed and direction. The setting are below and it is still a bit of a mystery to me how they work. Would be nice to find a good course on this. Anyway, I have set the track to start with the scene and loop, the spatial blend is 3D and there is the doppler level is set to 0.6. I also set a max distance meaning you can escape the music if you can escape the central part of the game.

Conclusion

I have been trying to focus on 2D games and pixel art, but I am running out of tutorials. This was my first proper attempt at mobile development and I’m glad I managed test it on my devices locally and then to get it onto Itch for play testing. There is something engaging about exploring 3D environments so I will probably try making a few more as I learn some new tricks!