The Path of the Game Dev — Day 22

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Keeping on with the cinematography and stealth game, I finished up the intro cutscene and started getting into the scripting portion of the course. Now it’s all starting to look a lot more like a game!

To wrap up the intro cutscene, I had to finish animating the virtual cameras as the scene progressed. This required a lot of adjustments to camera position, panning around the scene, and adding a little bit of noise to the static shots to give it more of a hand-held feel.

After I had established the shots, I had to align the virtual camera shots with the voice over track. This is where the real challenge began because although we were following the director’s notes from the preset package, there was still a bit of room to play with camera angles and timing of the cuts. When you pan the camera over to the sleeping guard, the course makes it one continuous shot with the close-up of the guard’s keycard and before transitioning to look up to the main vault behind him. It was so neat seeing how blending these shots together at different speeds could generate a totally different feel to highlight what the dialogue in the voice over track.

Lastly, I worked on the section dealing with the player’s movement. Since this course asks us to implement a point-and-click type of movement control it has quite a different feel from the 2D Space Shooter. This project uses a NavMesh to dictate where the player can and cannot move — and you can access this through UnityEngine.AI!

Biggest takeaways from the day: Working in 3D with Unity isn’t as scary as I thought. A bit of exploration can have some fun (and not so fun) results.

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