The Path of the Game Dev — Day 20

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Since I was little, my mom always joked that I’d grow up to be a director because of how bossy I was. Well guess who gets to make the shots now?

In truth, I didn’t think much about using Unity for things other than games. Sure, we used it at my old job to transition between scenes in the rooms, but it was more of a set and forget type of thing. Now that I’ve had the chance to really understand how that stuff was built, I’m more open to exploring what all this program can do.

The Cinematography course in the GameDevHQ program is a welcome look at one of those other options. While it still has you work with pre-rendered assets it’s really helpful for a complete beginner like me to understand how all of this works in the first place. Making a cutscene is a lot more complex than I thought!

There was some trouble at first — my laptop kept crashing and I had to restart it multiple times. The culprit was the auto-generated lighting. While I’m sure a more robust setup could handle it just fine, my poor old laptop would rather turn into a frying pan. Besides, the other sections of the course have yet to get me concerned about dynamic lighting…

One cool thing I like about Cinemachine is that it makes animating the scene so easy. At first I worried that I would be responsible for each frame but like we were shown in one of our senior lead’s presentations on Animation a few weeks ago, all you have to do is mark key frames and Unity will take care of the rest. So instead of manually panning the camera around the scene, just place your camera at the start, hit record, make sure you get the initial key frame and move the camera to where you want it to end. Looking forward to learning more tomorrow!

Biggest takeaways from the day: Be the director you always wanted to be.

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