The Path of the Game Dev — Day 3

Saving progress…

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The bulk of today’s work focused on the transition from 3D to 2D and implementing power ups to an arcade space shooter type of game. To me this was the first day where it felt like I was really getting the hang of how all of the earlier lessons were laying the foundation to create an amazing game from the ground up.

At first it seemed simple enough — just figure out how each power up changes the player’s behavior, make sure it grabs the right component, and implements . This was the first time I felt prepared for some of the problems the challenges threw my way — at times I even anticipated errors and accounted for them before the review covered them. Nevertheless the challenges in this section worked heavily in the linkage between scripts and so required careful planning and writing. One way I was able to keep track of which script was supposed to get access to which components was writing it down in a graph. This made it easier for me, a visual learner, to see the relationships between each line of communication. It will probably still take a few more days for it all to sink in…

My favorite part was implementing the sprite animations. Although this particular course only had us work with the sprites available in the Filebase tutorial, I was already getting excited thinking of what else would be possible within the animator. I guess I’ll have to wait to see!

Biggest takeaways from the day: A careful eye and patience are necessary skills in game development. You won’t believe how many times you will forget a period or a semicolon, especially buried within hundreds of lines of code.

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