Been a while huh?

Since I first made this blog and gave it its one and only post, a lot has happened.

As I said in the last paragraph of my other post, we we're broken into teams and my team was set to work on a game for cops4kidz, an organization of police and city officials dedicated to making kids and youths understand that the police are to be your trusted allies and not enemies. From that small bit, as well as the cops4kidz website ( http://cops4kidz.com/ ), we were able to get and idea of what to do for our game.

It was decided our game would be a simple internet flash of a few minor mini-games splashed in with info and nods towards the police and other groups that are part of the cops4kidz community. Since the cops4kidz website itself features basketball heavily, one of the mini-games was decided to be a basketball shooter. Since the site also mentioned that firefighters are a part of the cops4kidz community, we also decided on adding a game where the player puts out the fires on a burning building. The last mini-game we decided on was a small tile puzzle meant to represent the player getting locked out of their house and calling the police to help them get back in.

I personally ended up working only on two things as I'm still new to game-design and Unity 3D altogether. I built the starting room/house area that the player begins the game in and can return to in order to check their achievements. It's only two simple rooms with and opening door to the next room/overworld map. I used basic cubes to make the floor and walls before giving them a texture so that they weren't plain white. I added and area light near the ceiling to simulate a light fixture and then added in the doors. The doors themselves have a simple script that opens them up when the player walks near and then closes them once the leave the trigger zone, a small invisible box in front of them. The room is also set up with two cameras, one for each room in the area. Walking through the door from the first room into the second triggers the second camera and shuts off the first one, keeping the camera focused on the player.

The other part of the game I worked on is the Library level, where we decided to put the info about cops4kidz for the players to read about as well as our own minor credit page as the games developers. The basic layout of the room was done by another of our members while I was taking care of the starting room so I didn't have much with that. When I got to it, I mostly did some re-colors to give the room some life as well as adding in the scripts to make the information pop up for the player to read.

The room and its info go like this; on the left is the door to head back to the overworld while ahead is a table with five books. By walking in front of a book, that books' info will pop up on the wall behind the player to read. The first four books give info about cops4kidz while the last book simply credits us with making the game itself. The pop-ups are controlled by a script with an invisible box trigger like the doors I mentioned above in our starting room, walk into the invisible box before each book and the info appears but will then disappear as soon as you leave the trigger zone.

Why the Blog?

This Blog is for my CSG College course. As such it will be me posting what I've done and learned in my class as well as sometimes pics of what I'm currently working on.

So far I've only done a tutorial in the Unity 3D Program for a simple 3D Platform game called Lerpz.

Now in class we've broken into teams and are working on a new game for cops4kidz, a game meant to teach kids that police are helpful and to be trusted.