My brother and I started a fun little project inspired by UFO 50, which we're placeholder calling "Nay 50". The idea is that we came up with a bunch of mini game ideas (up to 50) about The Nays. We're also making them as if the characters themselves made them, which is adding a lot more flavor and personality to the presentation and contents of each game.
Because we're coming up with a large variety of gameplay styles, we decided this project would be best in Unity. Starting out, we're only spending about 4-6 hours on each game so we can get through more of them and mainly have quick prototypes done for this project. The first day of this project, we worked on 2 games.
Dump Typing
The first game we worked on is currently called "Dump Typing". This game is "created by" Pigger and Boney, two of the leaders of the group of orphans. In this game, there are prompts related to the orphans (names and phrases) that pop up, and you must type the word(s) correctly to move the character Chila forward, when racing against Boney.
With this project, I focused on the programming, while my brother focused on the art. I started earlier by making our Unity project with GitHub so we could have version control and easily share it. I haven't really worked on many personal projects in Unity, and it's been a bit since I made a project that used C# (since my previous project at work used Visual Scripting), so it started out by remembering where things were and refreshing my knowledge. I also coded in VS Code rather than Microsoft Visual Studio for the first time with Unity, and I can say that I definitely prefer it overall.
Even though the art in this one is 3D, we made a 2D scene and used 2D exported sprites. I started with the typing mechanic. I hadn't used player inputs by typing before in Unity, so I researched that a bit and used an input field. It looked a little different layout-wise when I was initially testing, compared to the screenshot below, but this is how the final UI layout looks now.
From there, I made a function that changes the text that you must type, depending on a variable. After you press Enter, it checks if you matched the text, switches to the next one.
I set up a timer and sound effects for if the text was correct. I was glad that changing the color and text itself was only 1 line of code each!
Then I set up the movement code. Because Boney moves automatically and Chila only moves when you type the correct prompt, I made separate movement scripts for each of them. This meant also setting up some code to make them stop moving if one of them has reached the end.
While I was writing all of this code, my brother was 3D modeling the characters and background. He exported them out as 2D spritesheets and implemented the animations in Unity. I replaced my placeholder shapes with his final art in Unity and restructured how the whole screen was set up based on that.
And with that, we wrapped up the Dump Typing game! It still has a few areas we'd like to update and fix up, but overall, we spent about 5 hours on the game. So I'm happy with how much we got done in that time.
Harrugh Ball
The second game is currently called "Harrugh Ball". It's a little dodgeball game that takes place in the desert. This was "created by" Subeebia and Baw, and the idea is that it'll be the Little Kids against monkeys. We only got to making 2 of the players facing against each other for now though.
In this project, I focused on the art while he focused on the programming I started by sketching out a basic layout for the scene in Photoshop. Starting with a sketch to get down the placement and size of the characters. We weren't planning to have a camera that moves, so focusing on getting everything in the 1920x1080 space was how I scaled it out.
Then I started with the background so he could figure out the collisions and space for the mechanics while programming. I made a bunch of different layers so we could do some parallaxing with some of the elements in the foreground or background.
After handing those over, I moved on to drawing the characters. I wanted to have multiple poses like idle, walking, and throwing, but I didn't want to spend too much time drawing a lot of different poses for this little project. So I decided to draw each part on different layers and basically rig the movements to make it faster. I started with the player character, Subeebia.
Then I was going to animate the character in a software called Spriter Pro, but I hadn't used it before and wasn't really sure where to get started because their tutorials were fairly sparse.
I decided to just use something I was a bit more familiar with instead: Adobe Animate. I started with Subeebia's animations and basically imported each part as its own layer, and then motion tweened them to make subtle movements. With Unity, I could have a lot of layers without needing to worry about frames as much. So I started with the throw animation.
I tried out using scenes so I could reuse the same symbols for multiple different animations. It worked out really well. I just ended up having to re-export since it did export all of the scenes rather than one at a time like I was hoping. I also updated the export settings for including transparency, since that didn't work initially at first.
Then I repeated those steps for Baw and eventually had 3 animations done for each character. My brother imported the animations into the game as well.
While I was working on the art, he got player movement down and then also mechanics to pick up the dodge balls that appear in random positions and throwing them. So the basics are there! I was doing some extra art like for the dodge balls, finding music and sound effects, a font, and some other visuals while he was working on this.
So that was it for this Harrugh Ball game! This one was a bit bigger than the previous one, so it took closer to 6 hours for us to put together, but it was all done in 1 night. So I'm happy with where we ended up here too!
And that's it for these first 2 games that we made! I really enjoyed this project, so I'm looking forward to making more of these. We planned about 30-40 mini game ideas. I'm not sure how many we'll get through, and they definitely aren't as in-depth as what you'd see in UFO 50, but it's a fun side project that's been a lot of fun to work on.
