koobas.hobune.stream
Too subjective and argumentative. Questions like this are better suited for the forums. This is not a technical and specific question.
Just Starting Out
Hi from the sunny UK,
Just starting out on my Unity voyage. I have a background in film/TV production/editing.
Having tried the Unity software it seems to me that one has to build a game in a specific order. Is that right?
Also if you create four scenes for a game, then at a later date, want to move scene four up to the front of the game will it still work? Or do you then have to tweak the code in the following scenes to make the game run?
In film/tv when you make special effects you have to layer the video in a certain way - if you then edit the video some elements may not show. Is that the same with Unity?
Sorry for the vague post. It is simply a question of how do I organise my workflow?
Ay thoughts welcome.
Ron.
Hi, and welcome to UA. This site is really intended for specific technical questions that can be definitively answered - more discussion-oriented questions about organising workflow etc. are better suited to the forums.
Having said that: I don't have a film/TV background but, to me, "scenes" in Unity are so-named precisely because they mirror the "scenes" that you'd be familiar with. That is to say, a scene contains all the backdrops, actors, lighting, props, and scripts for a particular part of your game. In traditional game ter$$anonymous$$ology, you can think of a separate scene being used for each "level" of the game, but, increasingly, modern game genres don't really have such delineated sections (how many "levels" does GTAV have, for example?).
Scenes are normally self-contained, but they can be loaded additively onto other scenes as a way of "chunking" a larger game world into more manageable sections. Some simple games only have one scene (e.g. typical infinite runners). Some games have hundreds. Scenes can be re-ordered or called out of order. You may your end credits in a separate scene for example, or you may have separate scenes for each dungeon and another scene for the overworld - the player could enter any dungeon scene in any order. If you had a level select screen, it would typically load the scene of the selected level.
Note that scenes have nothing to do with layering on the screen - they are simply logical units for separating out the different sections of your game.
What a strange site that others users and close down a thread,
There are a lot of different answers to a couple of your questions. I'll give you my own personal answers:
Unity is very much a game-oriented engine, with a slight focus on general purpose use. Since its mainly oriented around game development, there's a very consistent structure and routine to follow when creating parts of your project.
The basic structure for me is, after designing all of the mechanics and ideas for the game, start out with the player object - managing movement and what not - and work from there. Really, however, you can work however you want in Unity, you just have to have an understanding of the structure of the engine and how it's entity-component framework functions.
Scenes are entirely independent of each other. The only part of your project where the Scene-order matters is when you're building/compiling the product. In your Build Settings view, whichever scene is scene "0" is the scene that the game will start out with when the game loads.
I guess I the Entity-Component framework could be an analogy for your SFX layer anecdote. You attach components that execute in a certain order (according to the Script Execution Order inspector) and each component has some very specific or very broad effect.
Some people like to have components that have small scopes. (e.g. have one component for movement and another for damage/health). Others prefer to have components with larger scopes (e.g. a single player controller component for movement, health, inventory, etc). I personally like a mix of the two.
If you want to take a look at a more professional Unity3D project, take a look at Project Cygnus. Browse around the code or download the entire repository and open the project up in Unity to see what it kinda looks like. The code should read almost like English since I follow very strict coding conventions.
Thanks for taking the time to answer my question. $$anonymous$$uch appreciated. Thanks for the link to Cygnus - I'll take that for a spin around the block.
I would suggest you take a look at the various Unity tutorial projects: https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials
These will give you an idea of how to start the process.
Regarding building a game in a certain order - I'm not sure exactly what you mean. You could start at any point in your game. If you wanted to start by building the last boss encounter, go ahead. You might need to start by making some basic assets for your game - models, images, etc., but most game development starts with prototype objects anyways - just use a capsule as your player, cubes as enemies, etc, then add meshes and textures once the game starts to take shape.
You can freely rearrange scenes - the only code that should have to change is the code that actually executes the scene transition. If you are saving data between scenes then there might be more, but in general reordering scenes should not be much of an issue.
Regarding layering special effects - certain things do need to be handled in a specific order, but many things do not. This is far too generic of a question for me to give you any more information.
My suggestion for people getting into game development has always been to stop planning things and thinking about what you should be doing - just start doing it. You WILL fail and have plenty of half-finished and buggy projects, but each of those will be a learning experience. Watch a tutorial and then do something similar on your own, then watch another one and do something new. Eventually, you'll have the knowledge to start a project on the right footing and take it somewhere, but no one is going to be able to show you how to do that. It varies too much between people and between projects.
Thanks for taking the time to answer my question. $$anonymous$$uch appreciated. Yes, I am more than prepared for failures and disasters along the way. That happens in film and TV too.
Working my way through the Unity lessons. Good advice also from other designers about keeping goals small to start with.
