If you’re in a hurry, you can find the complete source code on GitHub: https://github.com/dgkanatsios/TowerDefense and the second part of the tutorial is posted here: https://dgkanatsios.com/2014/09/06/a-tower-defense-game-in-unity-part-2-3/. In part 1, we will see how the game levels are saved/loaded from XML files and a mechanism we use to optimize our game, called object pooling. In part 2, we will visit the core tower defense game mechanics. You can also test the game in WebGL here.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave in the recent years, you surely must have played a Tower Defense style game. Be it Plants vs Zombies, Kingdom Rush, geoDefense, Jelly Defense or any other, I’m sure you’ve spent much quality time setting up your defenses, killing enemies and advancing stages. So, since it’s one of the most common game types you can find on the application stores out there, I decided to try my luck and create one from scratch, using Unity3D and present it in this tutorial. Since it’s a bit bigger compared to my previous efforts, it will be split in two parts. In this first post, we’ll describe the game, the level editor, the respective XML creation and parsing and the object pool used in the game to increase performance. Check the screenshot below to get a taste of how the game looks like, running on the Unity editor.

Scenario and gameplay are both pretty basic, actually. Badgers are attacking user’s bunny house and she has her Chuck Norris trained bunnies to protect it, by shooting arrows. In order to be able to create more protector bunnies, user needs carrot money. If user kills all the badgers after the predetermined number of rounds, she wins. If enough badgers get into the bunny house, user loses! Badgers follow a path in order to approach the house upon which protector bunnies cannot be placed.

Let’s dive a bit deeper into the game mechanics and gameplay.

– Bunny House: Initial life is 10, each badger that arrives If 10 badgers arrive at the house, game is over.

– Path: The path that the badgers will walk on in order to arrive at the house. Specific waypoints will designate their direction.

– Badger: Our enemy. It has a speed property and a health component, which is decreased when it is hit by an arrow. It follows waypoints (non-visible gameobjects) that are placed on the path pieces.

– Bunny: Our defense. It can shoot arrows at a constant fire rate. It starts its activity by looking for an enemy at a close vicinity. If it finds one, it starts shooting. If the enemy dies or leaves the vicinity, it searches for another enemy. Has a standard carrot cost to create.

– Carrot: Falling randomly from the top of the screen. User needs to tap/click on them in order to increase money, to create more bunnies.

– BunnyGenerator: (yeah, I could have come up with a better name) It’s the bunny on the lower left part of the screen. User needs to drag it in order to create new bunnies. On areas that a new bunny cannot be created (such as on the path), it will highlight them as red. Upon a new bunny creation, a standard amount of money will be taken of the user’s account.

– Level Generator:  All game levels are to be stored in an XML file that uses a standard format. The Unity developer has the option to use a custom made Unity editor that saves the file from the scene editor to an XML file.

We also have a couple of “roles” that will be mentioned in this tutorial

– Unity developer: The one that will use our custom editor to create new levels for the game

– User/gamer: The end user that will enjoy our game!Read More »

This tutorial is meant for educational purposes only to showcase how to build certain types of games. Please respect the copyrights/trademarks of others!

If you are in a hurry, you can try the game here and check the source code here.

Last time I posted something around Angry Birds was 3 years ago, when I blogged about a 5’ creation of Angry Birds with 0 lines of code using XAML, Behaviors and Expression Blend. Well, it wasn’t exactly a clone, but it simulated on how to implement some basic dragging/collision/particles functionality with the Farseer Physics Engine. This blog post serves as an attempt to create a single level (with reusable components, long live the prefab!) of Angry Birds using Unity 3D platform. The game features a single level, 3 birds for the user to throw, 3 pigs that the user has to destroy, parallax backgrounds, a maximum strength for the bird (we cannot drag the bird more than a predefined distance), animations with the help of the excellent GoKit library, a projection of the trajectory of the bird (so we can more or less predict where it’ll land), the user’s ability to drag the screen to see the entire scene, pinch to zoom ability (for multitouch devices)  and a small trail that is left by the bird when it’s thrown.

Game scene in the Unity editor

The projected trajectory

The trail left by the bird

Before we begin, let’s mention the necessary stuff! Angry Birds, the red birds and the pigs are all registered assets trademarks of Rovio and this blog post serves no other than education purposes.

Game code was written in Visual Studio (check the free Community edition here). For debugging purposes, don’t forget to check the Visual Studio tools for Unity here.

Onto the game! It’s a pretty big game, we’ll attempt to cover most of the stuff. We’ll begin with examining our scene in the editor. As always, it would be better if you opened the game in Unity and examined all relevant parts as the post walks you through them.Read More »

This tutorial is meant for educational purposes only to showcase how to build certain types of games. Please respect the copyrights/trademarks of others!

Update: If you’re trying the downloaded game in Unity 5, uncheck the “Apply Root Motion” on the Animator component on the flappy GameObject and everything should work like a charm.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave or visiting outer space, you have certainly played Flappy Bird, one of the most successful games for mobile devices. Hence, I decided to give it a shot and recreate it using Unity. Needless to mention that all graphics and sounds found in the tutorial are used only for educational purposes and do not intend to harm any intellectual property at all circumstances. The sprite sheet used was found here http://www.spriters-resource.com/mobile/flappybird/sheet/59894/  whereas the sounds were found here: https://www.sounds-resource.com/mobile/flappybird/sound/5309/

Game code was written in Visual Studio (check the free Community edition here). For debugging purposes, don’t forget to check the Visual Studio tools for Unity here.

So, let’s start  with the small tutorial! This game’s development has many aspects, we’ll attempt to touch all of them one by one. First of all, we used Unity’s spritesheet editor to “slice” the spritesheet and get references to specific sprites

Then, we created a small animation to simulate the flight course of the bird (this can be easily accomplished if you drag-drop the relevant sprites into the scene).

Now, let’s take a more detailed look at our scene. We have various objects made children of our perspective camera and the Flappy bird.

Read More »

I had blogged in the past about a simple puzzle game in XNA. Nothing better than to recreate it in Unity with a tutorial, of course! To begin with, here’s a screenshot of the game running on the editor

The purpose of the game is to tap/click on the pieces next to the empty one so that they exchange positions. It goes on and one until you make the pieces appear as in the original photo. Since you are reading this article, I suppose you most probably are a novice Unity user. The following Microsoft Virtual Academy video might be useful for you: http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/developing-2d-3d-games-with-unity-for-windows-jump-start

To begin with, we’ll need a photo. The best way to save yourself from copyright issues and not having to read licenses etc is to use a photo that you took! So, we need to slice it. For this purpose, we’ll use Unity’s native 2D tools and its sprite editor.

Once we set the sprite mode to multiple, we can use the sprite editor to ‘slice’ our image. Since the image does not have an alpha channel, we’ll use Grid slicing. Moreover, we’ll name our exported sprites with a name that contains their location information (i.e. piece-0-0 => this implies that the sprite’s “correct” location is on the top left corner of our game). Plus, we’ll set each sprite’s pivot point to be top left, since this will help us in positioning.

Read More »

This tutorial is meant for educational purposes only to showcase how to build certain types of games. Please respect the copyrights/trademarks of others!

Some time ago I did a blog post about a brick game (like Arkanoid) and its adaptation to Windows Phone using XNA. Couple of weeks ago, I attempted to recreate it from scratch using the Unity game engine and, to no surprise, it was pretty a piece of cake. Below you can see a screenshot from the start screen of the game.

Game has been tested on Windows Phone/Store apps. For instructions on how to deploy your existing game onto Windows Store/Phone, check out the Microsoft Virtual Academy video here: http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/porting-unity-games-to-windows-store-and-windows-phone

Let’s do a lap around the project. First of all, we have one and only one scene, the game one.

 

We have

• a Camera, set to Orthographic projection (most suitable for 2D games)
• a directional light
• a GameManager gameobject which holds the GameManager script, in charge of running our game
• the Ball which goes around on the level
• the Paddle which is the means that the user will utilize in order to prevent the Ball from touching the floor
• the Floor, which if collided with the Ball will decrease player’s lives
• the SideBlocks which just make the Ball stay in our level
• the Status Text GameObject which will display text messages
• and, of course, the Blocks which have to be hit by the Ball (via user’s assistance) and are organized in four BlockRow objects

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About 4 years ago I had blogged about the creation of the classic Bubble Breaker game in XNA. Since I’ve recently started to get acquainted with the Unity3D game engine, one of the first things that crossed my mind was to try and recreate it using Unity. Why did I choose Unity? Well, one of the reasons is that it supports my favorite programming language C# plus games can be exported to my favorite platform, Windows Phone. Conversion from XNA was not that straightforward (well, I expected that, to be honest) in the matter that only the search and compare algorithms managed to survive. Game code was written in Visual Studio (check the free Community edition here). For debugging purposes, don’t forget to check the Visual Studio tools for Unity here.

Game implementation is pretty basic, it contains 3 screens. First, we have the intro screen where you can select either to play the game or view the top 10 scores. Then, there is the main game screen (we’re making a game after all!). All screens have a script to dynamically change the background color. Purpose of the game is to remove all (or at least most of) the bubbles in the game by tapping. Once the user taps on a bubble, the neighboring ones (vertically and horizontally) will be marked for removal. On a second tap to one of the marked bubbles, they will disappear and the ones above these will fall due to gravity. Moreover, game tends to push the bubbles onto the right of the screen, so as not to have an empty column during the course of our game. Check out some screenshots from the game running inside Unity Editor.

 

Main screen contains some simple Unity GUI buttons in which we can navigate to game and high scores screens, plus a simple checkbox to activate/deactivate sounds (I got that feedback from the single beta tester – that’s me!).

On the game screen, each bubble is a rigidbody (that’s Unity way of saying that each bubble obeys the laws of gravity). We keep track of the positions of all bubbles in a 2D array and we initialize each and every one using a random color, dynamically pulled from the ResourcesMaterials folder (yeah, this could have been done in an easier way but I just wanted to experiment with dynamically loading stuff without providing them as fields/parameters to the script).

Read More »