The bloginning

So, just like any other games project the first thing I did when I opened unity was create my folder structure, as it's important to me to retain consistency when designing games. At an early stage of development, I decided that I was going to make a quick prototype of the game and test it to see how it felt.

The Prototype

When creating the prototype, the original idea I had was some sort of horror shooter game. In this game, you would be exploring a map and there’d be zombies with guns that would shoot you if you got too close. So, the first step was to make the player, I started this process by using 3D cylinders and creating the weapon out of two cubes that I rotated.

After creating the player and his weapon, I started writing some scripts to allow the player to walk around and shoot his weapon. When I was creating the weapon script, I was adamant that I wanted to use object pooling for when the player shoots their weapon. The reason for this was because it’s a great way to optimise the project and it taught me something new. As you can see below this is instantiating the first ten bullets and then essentially recycles those bullets without having to constantly instantiate a bullet, however, if you manage to shoot more than ten bullets before they’re destroyed it will go back to instantiating more bullets. Thankfully, I managed to slow the rate of fire down so this is extremely unlikely to happen.

The last thing I added to this version of the prototype was enemies, and enemies were also 3D cylinders holding the same style of gun!

This acted as a good place to start testing the scripts I had set up, as this allowed me to see how the enemies interacted with the player and the environment around them. To test how the enemies interacted with the environment I placed some cubes in the world and waited to see how they’d react.