Tag: Unity

Exporting your Unity project as an APK

Exporting your Unity project as an APK (for Android)

Are you planning to create a Unity game for mobile devices? Wondering how you can export your game and install it as an app on Android? Look no further — here’s a step-by-step guide to exporting your game onto your Android device.

If you’re looking for a way to test your game as you’re making it, check out Unity Remote — it’s an Android app that mirrors Unity Editor’s Game screen when you are in Play Mode. Once you’ve installed it, we have a guide covering how to get Unity Remote working on your devices.

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Apoca Force - Gameplay

Drawing radar charts for stat UIs in Unity

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. To provide some variation (and eye candy) in gameplay, the game provides a variety of different WAIFUs for players to deploy.

To display the different stats WAIFUs have, we decided to include a radar graph on our build interface to illustrate the stats of each type of WAIFU. In this article, I will talk about the technicalities involved in making that happen.

I have previously written an article about how we rendered Unity’s NavMesh to show our WAIFUs’ walkable areas. Check it out!

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Intellisense Featured Image

Fixing Visual Studio’s IntelliSense (auto-complete) in Unity

19 April 2020: We’ve updated this article with a contributed solution from one of our readers in the comments section.

One of the biggest perks of using Microsoft’s Visual Studio to write your Unity scripts is IntelliSense — a code completion aid in Visual Studio that offers suggestions as you write your code, and contextually presents you with information about classes, properties and methods that you are working with.

Given Unity’s enormous scripting API, IntelliSense is a tremendously helpful feature, especially for coders who are beginning their foray into developing games and software with Unity; and while we’d love to say that IntelliSense is automatically set up and linked to Unity’s API when you install it with the Unity Editor, sometimes that’s just not the case. So, if you’ve got both Unity and Visual Studio set up, but find that IntelliSense is still not offering Unity API suggestions, then this guide is for you.

Visual Studio's IntelliSense for Unity
If IntelliSense doesn’t automatically offer Unity API suggestions like these, then it isn’t working.
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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:

Enjoyed this article? Then check out this other article about how we drew stat graphs for our WAIFUs on our UI interface.

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Dust to Dust

Organising your Unity Inspector fields with a dropdown filter

Over the past 4 months, my team and I have been working on a rogue-like hack-and-slash game for our school’s final year project called Dust to Dust. We have very high ambitions for the game, and we had never worked on projects as large of a scale as this. Of course, by doing that, the challenges we encountered got bigger as well. We had to keep track of many parameters in developing a role-playing video game, and quickly realised that the time taken to find Inspector properties in the project was getting longer and longer. Furthermore, the project was on a 15-week timeline, so every minute was valuable.

Hence, we needed an effective solution that would ease navigation in the project, and — like before — it became clear that we had to once again extend the Unity Editor to suit our needs.

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Ex-Terminator

Creating Reorderable Lists in the Unity Inspector

Update: Like this article? Then check out this other article on creating a dropdown filter for the Unity Inspector.

Over the last 5 months or so, me and my team have been involved in the development of a hybrid tower defense and RTS game called Ex-Terminator (click on the link to try it out, it’s free!) as part of a school project. During the course of developing the game, we quickly realised that, in order to allow us to have the flexibility to experiment with our level design, we had to experiment with a class in Unity called the ReorderableList.

If you’ve read some of the other articles here, you’d have noticed that we normally link Unity classes to its page on the Unity Scripting Reference. We didn’t do so here because there is no official documentation for it at the time this article was written. The ReorderableList class is filed under the namespace of UnityEditorInternal, which also doesn’t have official documentation. We’ve decided to write an article about it, however, because of how useful it is, and because of how little information there is currently about it online.

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Unity Editor Scene view

Checking the type of GameObject you are colliding with in Unity

In any given game, you are probably going to find dozens, if not hundreds of different objects colliding or intersecting with one another. Hence, one of the first things you learn in Unity is how to identify the type of object you have touched. These are the most common ways to do so among beginners:

void OnTriggerEnter(Collider other) {
     // If a GameObject has an "Enemy" tag, remove him. 
    if(other.tag == "Enemy") {
        Destroy(other.gameObject);
    }
}
void OnCollisionEnter(Collision collisionData) {
    // If a GameObject has an "Enemy" tag, remove him.
    if(collisionData.collider.tag == "Enemy") {
        Destroy(other.gameObject);
    }
}

Essentially, the idea is checking whether the object we are colliding with or touching has been labelled with an Enemy tag, before we perform any action on the object.

Where tags are assigned.
Image source: Unity Manual: Tags

While it is simple and easy-to-understand, there are better ways of identifying objects we are colliding with.

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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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