Hi all,
Last night I uploaded my first game to the Android store and I’m over the moon about that. I am busy with the Brick Breaker part of the 2D course, having done a Unity course some time ago on Coursera as well (a long time ago). About half-way through Brick Breaker I thought of a few things I’d like to adapt into my own project, and Balloon Pop! is the result.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.miniaturegiants.balloonpop
This is a really silly, simple game where I spawn ballons at random points along the x axis with a fixed y value. I borrowed the ‘walls’ from brick breaker to set the boundaries for the scene. I borrowed the Scene Management code we learnt. Even though the game is simple, it took me a full week of effort every night to get right and along the way I encountered many new challenges like:
- Trying to figure out how to spawn new balloons when the old ones pop
- Trying to figure out how to use a particle system to make an effect when the balloon pops
– trying to figure out why these effects weren’t visible (layers)
– trying to figure out how to kill the instantiated particle system ones the instantiated prefab balloon had popped
– trying to figure out why sound put on the prefab wasn’t playing when a given instance of the prefab was destroyed (this was really confusing and the solution was not logical to me…yet)
More or less every night I had one of these challenges to work through. And then came trying to build the thing to my phone and tablet and setting up the android SDK command line tools. And then trying to publish it to Google Play and learning all about keys, certificates and signing APK’s.
It’s been a total adventure!! And what you have is something that is cool, keeps my toddler wildly entertained (which is why i made it), and which has alot of room for improvement. On my list of things to add are:
- Android input code (I’m still only using MouseDown!)
- Music to add some atmosphere
- instead of one balloon prefab, an array of balloon prefabs! (sounds, images etc.)
- Extra UI functionality, like a Pause button, Sound On/off when I have sound etc. (i’d really like to research pull-out menus)
- and much more.
So what I will say is the following:
- Almost all of my challenges had been experienced by someone before and there are various answers/examples of code that you can look at and try to adapt to your own project
- When none of that works, the Unity Forums are very useful - I found one guy who showed me stuff I hadn’t even heard of yet that just wasn’t quite right for what I needed, and another with a super elegant approach for my problem
- The UNITY manual is not always correct - like it stipulated the wrong directory setup in Unity for the Android SDK
- Sometimes you just need to step away and sleep on it, let the info you’re consuming digest for a while, take stock of the learning you’ve done, and see what comes to you! The particle system destroy issue resolution was a combination of 2 pieces of feedback I had been trying independantly.
The exciting thing about all of the above, is that now that I’ve made this actually work, I already have ideas on how to take it and iterate for my next game! I also have a few ideas on how I can rework this concept into other games. The course has been a real inspiration to me - so between all of the above I need to get back to it and carry on learning!
TL;DR: I made my first game after being inspired on the 2D course! it was hard, but if you stick with it you’ll get through it! Check it out on Android here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.miniaturegiants.balloonpop
