COLTON OGDEN: All right.

Welcome back to GD50.

This is Lecture 8.

Today we're going to be diving into the world of Unity

for the first time, which I'm excited about.

Going to be a whirlwind tour, but I'll try to cover as much as possible.

Transitioning away from 2D and away from Lua and LOVE 2D into 3D and C#

in the context of Unity.

Today we'll be talking about Helicopter Game 3D.

So Helicopter Game is a 2D game that was really famous in the 2000s.

It was a web game.

I was sponsored on a bunch of websites.

Addictinggames.com still has it on there,

and a few other websites have it.

It was a flash game.

But I remember playing it a lot.

It was the old precursor to Flappy Bird, which

was mentioned on the Wikipedia page.

There's a reference to it there.

And this is what the game play looked like.

It was very similar to Flappy Bird-- a little bit different

in that, instead of trying to avoid pipes, you're in a cave,

and you're trying to avoid the ceiling and the ground of the level.

And there were these little obstacles that would spawn in the middle,

as well.

So you'd have to navigate that.

But it was the same exact mechanic-- the sort of like, click to go up.

And then, when you didn't click, your helicopter

would just sink down via gravity.

Today we'll be talking about a bunch of brand new topics, things like Unity,

first and foremost-- the ecosystem with which we'll be doing

a lot of the things we'll be doing.

C# is the primary language we'll be using.

So we're going to take a step away from dynamic languages and move towards

statically-typed languages--

languages like C#, and Java, and the like.

Blender is a program we'll look at briefly today,

just because, in the context of 3D development,

you're going to want to have a tool that will let you create models.

And so the 3D software that I like to advocate for the most, especially

for folks that are just starting out, is Blender, because it's free,

and open source, and it has much the same feature

set as any commercial software, like 3D Studio Max, and Cinema 4D,

and the like.

We'll talk about what components are-- entities and components, how

they relate in this model that Unity has adopted for all of its programming.

Components are little pieces of behavior that you can then

combine to form a whole, that will then drive the behavior of whatever object

in your scene you want, rather than having

to customize its behavior via a long chain of inheritance and instantiation.

Colliders and triggers are important in 3D--

and 2D.

But today we'll be talking about colliders

and triggers-- things like the helicopter

colliding with coins, and buildings, and other planes that are flying.

Each of those has to have a collider.

And certain things have to be considered triggers in order to trigger

certain behavior with other entities.

Prefabs and spawning-- prefabs is a huge concept in Unity.

So prefabs are basically prefabricated objects

that you can customize as you want to-- lay them out in the editor,

rather than having to necessarily code all the details.

And then you can instantiate them in the actual scene,

via code programmatically, in a way that fits the model you're striving for.

Texture scrolling is something we'll look at briefly, because it's

the way that we accomplish the infinite scrolling aesthetic or behavior.

And we'll look at how we can do that in a different way

than we've done before, using u-v coordinates,

and specifically looking at materials, and modifying

certain attributes of those materials.

And lastly, to tie everything together as we've done before,

we'll look at audio-- things like audio listeners and audio sources--

what the difference is between them, and how

to add them easily to our game project.

But first, a demo-- if there would be anybody

willing to come up and take a look and play the 3D helicopter game that I

put together, that would be awesome.

Anybody?

Steven?

Awesome.

Thank you so much.

Let me go ahead and actually get it--

so I've pre-built it.

So let me go ahead and.

So the nice thing about Unity is, it exports to multiple platforms.

And right out of the gate, you can get just a--

I didn't put an icon for it.

But you can create just a native application very easily.

And so whenever you're ready, go ahead and hit Play,

and Up and Down will move your helicopter.

So this is the 3D helicopter game.

And I don't think we have sound live, but there should be audio.

Oh, I might have actually-- here we go.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

There we go.

That was my bad.

So there is music playing.

There's sound effects.

So notice that we have a 3D model.

This is what's called a 2.5D game.

So even though everything is in 3D--

the models and so forth--

the actual axes upon which we're bound are just two.

We're just bound to, I believe, the x and the y.

Could be the z and the x.

I don't recall offhand.

But we're bound to just simply two axes of movement.

But all the models, as we can see by the camera,

are in 3D, including our helicopter.

So we have a few things going on.

We have skyscrapers that are scrolling by.

We have coins that are also going by at the same speed as the skyscrapers.

We have a background that is infinitely scrolling.

We have, of course, our helicopter which has a rotating set of blades.

And when we collide with a coin, notice that we get a little--

it might be hard to see in house, but we have a little particle

effect that plays.

There's airplanes that are flying up top,

so we're instantiating those, as well, to fly past us

to provide another layer of obstacle.

And if we collide with an airplane, notice that we get de-spawned,

and then we trigger another particle effect to imitate an explosion.

And then, notice we also have a couple of other elements.

We have a GUI.

We have two GUI elements-- a coin total at the top right,

and then a game over here in the middle of the screen, which

only shows up once we have died.

And the explosive behavior-- if you want to collide with a building,

you'll see that.

It also triggers when you collide with a building.

So there's two things looking for these explosions-- the airplanes up top,

and the buildings below.

Those are our two obstacles.

But when they collide with the coins, we should increment our coin total,

and then display a different particle effect.

And then this goes on ad infinitum.

You can press Space to restart.

So we have keyboard input that's based on what

we press, different things happen.

And so that's effectively the demo that I've put together today.

So thanks, Steven.

I appreciate you coming up to demo it.

So that's the 3D helicopter game.

It's got most of the same mechanics as the web version from before--

I would say, maybe even more features just to illustrate a few new concepts.

But that's effectively what we're going with today.

We're just a pretty simple, Flappy Bird esque differently-themed game,

based on the same principles.

Fly forever, avoid obstacles.

And in this case, even get little collectibles.

And so notice that there are also effectively two states

in our game, which are just the playing state, and then the game over state.

The two are almost effectively the same.

The only real difference is that one doesn't have the helicopter present,

and displays a different GUI element in the middle of the screen.

If you haven't downloaded Unity already, there's two links here.

So the top link is just the catchall download link.

And then the second link is the beta link.

So we're actually using the beta in this course,

because Unity has started transitioning away

from a numerical system for their releases,

and is now going yearly with their releases.

So the last long-term release candidate was 2017's version.

But now that we're almost halfway through 2018,

the newest beta is the 2018 version.

It has a bunch of new features.

So go ahead and check that out.

And everything's been well tested, and runs very well--

very smoothly on Windows and Mac--

with the new beta.

So what is Unity?

The difference between what we've done so far and what we're doing today is,

now we're actually using a full-fledged game engine--

this system.

It's got a built in editor and all this awesome, cool

functionality that we really didn't get with Love2D before.

What we were doing before was using a framework,

and just implementing everything purely in code.

And as we'll see today, everything that you want to do that's customizable

effectively is--

or can be-- done via code.

But there are a lot of more efficient and more user-friendly

ways to accomplish the same thing, which we'll take a look at.

So Unity has a tremendous market share right now.

I forget.

I think in 2016 it had like 43% of all games released were done in Unity.

I don't know what the current numbers are.

I couldn't find them.

But there are other engines that are also very well used--

Unreal being among them.

And Unreal actually may have more market share now,

because of games like Fortnite, and because it's

been improved a lot over the last couple of years, and really marketed well.

But Godot, CryEngine-- there are a lot of game engines

that are similar to this that provide you

this all-encompassing way of dealing with your game scene

and with all your game data.

But Unity is a very easy engine to start getting used to,

and cranking things out, and being productive with,

without the tremendous learning curve that some

of the other engines like Unreal might have.

Unreal does have a more user-friendly way of doing things.

But if you want to get down into the nitty gritty with Unreal,

you're coding in semi-arcane C++.

So for folks who aren't used to it and aren't used to 3D game development,

it can be kind of a large board to get onto.

The nice thing about Unity, aside from the fact

that it's fairly easy to get started with, is that it's free.

And you can use it completely with all of its features

until you start making over $100,000 in gross revenue releasing Unity products.

And then there are other tiers.

The next tier above that is if you start making $200,000,

and you get new features with these other tiers.

But if you want to just start up a new company,

and use Unity, and take something to market--

completely free to do so.

And once you get over $100,000, that's a good problem to have.

It's not necessarily too much to ask to start

paying Unity to use it as a means of getting

onto the market in the first place.

And especially in mobile and VR, Unity's sort of like the forefront.

It's got even higher percentage.

It's like 60-something or 70% market share on mobile.

And then VR-- from the beginning, it's marketed itself very strongly

towards the use of VR.

And we'll actually use VR in the next lecture.

And the way in which we will accomplish all of the programmatic aspect

of this-- getting things actually implemented in code--

is via C#, which is very different than what we've used so far,

which we've used Lua, which is a dynamic scripting language,