Category: Games

Apoca Force WAIFUs

Showing Unity’s NavMesh in-game

As part of a school assignment in the past year, my team and I created Apoca Force, a tower defense game where WAIFUs (World Apocalypse Intercepting Frontline Units) are deployed onto a battlefield to combat an undead horde. In this game, WAIFUs serve as the eponymous towers of the genre, but with a twist — by spending some resource, they can be moved after they are deployed.

To denote the areas that WAIFUs can walk on, we created an interface that highlighted walkable areas on the map when players decide to move their WAIFUs. This is what we ended up with:

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Swords and Shields
Awesome starters artwork by Ry Spirit: https://instagram.com/ryspiritart/

Calculating EVs needed to raise a stat in Pokémon

As a result of working on upgrades for this Pokémon Effort Value Calculator, math has been a pretty big part of my life for the past few months, as I’ve been rearranging the games’ formulas for stat and damage calculation to make my own that fit my needs.

One such formula was the EVs needed one, which gives you the amount of EVs you need to invest to raise a stat by n points. Everyone knows that at Level 100, you get 1 stat point for every 4 EV points you invest; but what happens when you’re not at Level 100, or when you factor in stat modifiers like Nature, or item and ability boosts?

Don’t know what effort values are? Start with this article from Bulbapedia. Don’t play the mainline Pokémon games? Then you should start with these.

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Unity Remote Splash Screen
Unity Remote 5 Android app splash screen

More tricks to get Unity Remote for Android working on Windows

28 May 2020: We’ve updated the article with some new details and 2 whole new sections!

This article is a continuation of Getting Unity Remote for Android to work on Windows. If you haven’t read that, I suggest you take a look at the article and make sure that Android Build Support (and its accompanying Unity-native SDK, NDK and JDKs) is installed, and that you have tried installing the Google USB Driver.

There are also some simple troubleshooting tips listed in that article that you should try first, before you attempt the ones here.

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Unity Remote Splash Screen
Unity Remote 5 Android app splash screen

Getting Unity Remote for Android to work on Windows

30 July 2020: We’ve updated the article with helpful comments from past readers. Thanks for all your contributions!

If you’re developing a game for Android on Unity, Unity Remote is an irreplaceable tool that allows you to quickly test your game on your Android device using Unity’s built-in Play-in-Editor feature. Unfortunately, it is also pretty difficult to get Unity Remote to work, since it requires some very specific configurations on both your Android device and your computer.

Available solutions online are often incomplete, inaccurate, or outdated (Unity Remote was released more than 4 years ago, and the Android development scene is very different from how it was then), so you often have to piece solutions from multiple sources to get one that works. Hence, after recently grappling with getting Unity Remote to work on a handful of my own computers, I’ve decided to write an article outlining the most important steps for getting Unity Remote to work. Hopefully, this will save you from having to do over 9000 Google searches like I did.

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GitHub Desktop
Image from https://desktop.github.com/

Using GitHub Desktop as your source control repository in Unity

If you’re working on a Unity project on the default, free Unity license, you’re only allowed to have a maximum of 3 people (and a storage limit of 1GB) on Unity Collaborate. While you can work around the headcount limitation by adding and removing members as and when they need to make a commit, it can quickly become a tremendous hassle. Hence, for those not willing to pay for a Unity license, a cheap and easy way to go around both the personnel and storage limit is to use GitHub Desktop for collaboration.

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2D vector math hero - polar movement

Vector math for polar movement in 2D games (Unity)

Polar movement, i.e. moving objects at an angle, is something that people starting out in games programming often have trouble with. Coordinate systems are easy to understand, and so is moving things left and right or up and down; but what if you want to move at angles that are not parallel to an axis, like 30° upwards, or towards a target? How do you get a vector that represents that direction of movement?

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Emission lighting in Unity

Getting your emission maps to work in Unity

Emission maps (also known as emissive maps) are textures that can be applied to materials to make certain parts of an object emit light (like the cube in the image above). In Unity, lights from emission maps don’t start affecting the scene as soon as you place them on the material. There are a lot of settings you have to get right in your scene and material settings to get the emission maps working right.

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Collision Detection Modes in Unity

Collision detection modes in Unity’s Rigidbody component

It isn’t particularly difficult to set up physics-based movement for objects in Unity — simply add a Rigidbody component onto an object that has a Collider component, and you’ll have yourself an object that moves and collides realistically with other objects.

Discrete collision
This was set up in 10 minutes.

If you start having fast-moving objects however, you might start to see these objects tunnel through obstacles.

Discrete collision tunnelling
Just like quantum physics. Sort of.
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Coding your projectile arc

Coding projectiles for your tower defense game — Part 2

In the second part of this series, we will be exploring how to give our projectiles a nice vertical arc as they travel towards the target. This article will expand upon the work in Part 1, where we coded a projectile that could home in onto the target and detect collision with the target without using Unity’s physics engine’s.

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