From Photographer to Video Game Creator — Day 9

Today was fun at times and also a little difficult at others. Let’s start with the fun stuff!

First up was a quick introduction to adding a Post Process Volume object. This object allows you to adjust the look and feel of the entire game. It can also be broken up into smaller partitions to create similar feels for similar locations within a game. Let’s say for example you have multiple dark rooms that you want to all have the same feel, but you also have wide open spaces that you want to have a different feel. You can attach a separate Post Processing object to each of these to provide some consistency across your game.

Here is a look at the color grading menu within Unity. Today, I spent most of my time familiarizing myself with some of the options because there are definitely plenty of them. I plan on coming back to this section to fine tune the look of my game once I’m a little closer to completion and have everything working properly!

Up till now, my game is super stealthy and the only sounds being made are the ones coming from the keys of the keyboard. Let’s change that!

Jumping into the audio section of unity I found the use of another component called the Audio Source. This allowed me to attach audio files to my objects rather quickly. Now all I needed to do was tell each object when to play the sound clips.

I started with Lasers and created the connection between the Audio Source Component and the correct audio file for my lasers.

I then coded the laser audio to play each time my Player fired a laser.

The process was pretty similar to create an explosion sound for my Enemies and my powerups! I coded the Enemy explosion to play each time the Enemy object was destroyed by a laser or the player. This concept was the same for collecting a powerup. My game is no longer silent and it feels 100% better shooting lasers that actually make a sound!

I ended my day by attempting to export (or build) a test version of my game. This is where it all went wrong…

I was met with multiple errors and once my game finally exported successfully, I was unable to open the application on my computer. Currently have no idea how to fix this, BUT I’m hopeful that I can find the solution tomorrow morning!

Cheers for now,

-Myles M.