Development Blog #2 – Coding the basic mechanics & HDRP

During this first proper week of development, there was no specific goals to meet or any requirements that needed filling. I decided that I could use this week to focus on getting a character moving around the scene and learning the HDRP pipeline for unity.

Coding the first mechanics

I could see from Rylan’s GDD what movement mechanics the player will have. The player can walk, sprint and jump for its main movements. In order to make the player move, I followed two YouTube tutorials from Sebastian Lague. Despite the creator publishing the source code and project, I decided to follow the code and type it myself so I could learn what each section of the code does what. By doing this, I am hoping to be able to fix any issues that could arise when implementing our own custom assets. I did, however, use the player model and animations provided by Sebastian which will help during the prototyping of mechanics. This way I wouldn’t be using a default cube or have to wait until our custom player model has been made.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNmeK3qK7oAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwD1UHNCzOc 

I found the tutorials I followed professionally explained and easy to follow which will definitely help me when editing the code or making improvements later on down the line. 

Setting up HDRP

Edge of Samsara is a realistic 3D game so would need to look great. I knew from previous research that Unity has released a scriptable rendering pipeline (SRP). In the most recent versions of Unity (2018+), the SRP has come pre-packaged with a few preset versions. The Lightweight Render Pipeline (LWRP) and the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP). I decided that HDRP would be the best option for our game.

Setting up the project proved to be a lot more effort than expected, however. I more or less jumped straight into the project without doing much prior research. This lead to me not understanding what I was doing and causing the project to break and result in starting new.

Eventually, I had worked out a quick fix by copying a “Volume Settings” asset from the example scene provided which gave me the lighting settings that I needed.

Other issues faced

The main issues faced this week was the difference of Unity versions between different computers, both at university and at home. The versions installed on the studio computers are a few behind the current build that Unity has released. This wouldn’t be a problem other than I have the latest version installed on my computer at home. This difference in versions meant that I was always having to reimport assets and would cause issues with HDRP, resulting in a new project needing to be started.