Game 2: Tanks

For this month's project, I completed Unity’s Tanks tutorial which taught me how to create a 2-player game using 1 keyboard. I initially started this tutorial at the beginning of the past summer. When I started working full-time in June, I stopped working through game tutorials. I was working 9 to 5, then taking a 3.5 hour long night class on weekdays at a local community college. I ended up taking a 5 month break from learning how to make video games. I was inspired to continue my journey recently after talking to the game design professor at my school. I ended up making time to make video games by cutting out playing and streaming video games at night.

Below is a demo of a class mate and I play testing the game.

What went well

Months ago, I attempted to create a tower defense game but gave up when I couldn’t get my enemy spawner to work correctly. After creating the spawner in the tower defense game, my whole game didn’t work.I couldn’t figure out how to return to an earlier version of my project since I didn’t use version control through GitHub like I do now.

This Tanks game also uses a spawner in the game manager to spawn the tanks every round. It was great getting the spawner and game manager to work this time around and makes me want to return to the previous tutorial now that I have more knowledge. When I was originally working on the tower defense tutorial, it was just after I had completed the first tutorial for Cube Run, so I was still completely new to making games with Unity.

What went wrong

When testing the game halfway through the tutorial, the tank was getting instantly demolished when I dropped a projectile on it. The game works that if you shoot the projectile from further away, it deals less damage. No matter the distance, the whole tank would just explode and disappear. I figured it was likely a problem with the tank health, tank shooting, or shell explosion script. Eventually, I found that it was the shell explosion script.

What I learned

Audio mixing was entirely new to me so that was exciting to learn. The few tutorials/games that I worked on before didn’t involve any kind of sound. It was nice to hear the sound effects come through clearly by making the background music duck.

It was also cool to learn to make things vary depending on which tank it was interacting with. For example, each tank makes a different pitched driving sounds so the users can tell just from the sound effects which tank is driving. Also when displaying the points, the round winner, and the game winner, the UI text will match the color of the specific player’s tank.

What to come back to

I don’t think I want to adjust anything in this tutorial unless I find any bugs. I’m pretty happy with the way the settings are. Completing this tutorial does make me want to return to the tower defense tutorial I mentioned prior where I messed up the game manager and enemy spawner.