The combination of the Christmas holiday and the pandemic lockdown left me with lots of spare time. I tried out a bunch of projects, including building a rudimentary platformer in Unity.

The amount you can do with this free software is amazing. Fundamental elements of the game such as collisions and physics are all sorted out without code, freeing you up to focus on stuff like player control. However, it still took a while to get things working because scripts are written in a language I am unfamiliar with: C#.

I have messed with C++ a tiny bit before and made a Space Invaders knock-off with pygame a while back, so I had a bit of a foundation to build on. That said, I did have to take a couple of C# tutorials to get a sense of how it works.

Now that this first project is complete, I am planning to start again from scratch with my own art assets made in Inkscape and some more elaborate behaviours. I have some ideas for a game that incorporates data, but I need to get a bit better at the fundamentals first. I will try to embed any later games here to be played in browser.

In the meantime, here is a quick video of my first attempt at a game in Unity (with background music from my Audiotool track Charge):