Table of contents
Let’s learn how to implement the various systems that make up a real-time strategy game in the well-known game engine Unity! Throughout this series of tutorials, we will explore C# scripting for games, GUI building, event systems, sound optimization…
🚀 Find the code of this tutorial series on my Github!
Note: I will keep updating this table of contents as new tutorials are published, every Thursday — so if you’re interested, be sure to keep an eye on this list! :)
Table of contents
Main articles
- Tutorial #1: Placing buildings
- Tutorial #2: Adding a very basic UI
- Tutorial…
Did you know that a method can return multiple values in C#? That’s thanks to tuples and deconstruction!
Starting from C# 7.0 (released with Visual Studio 2017), the language has a great feature that I’ve only recently really dived into: tuples.
Tuples allow you to group together loosely related data to create temporary (but mutable) lightweight data structures that can be passed around to or from methods easily and overall make your code more readable.
They are pretty straight-forward to implement and they can be used for various things, such as anonymous types in queries, making a method return multiple values or, sometimes, advantageously replacing a struct or a class. …
Today, let’s continue our web 3D runner game and create some objects to populate our level!
⬅️ Tutorial #4: Making an infinite plane with a shader| TOC
In the previous episode, we saw how to make the infinite animated grid. We used a little trick, relying on shaders, to make it much more efficient to compute, thanks to the power of parallel computation of GPUs; and so overall, for now, not a single object in our scene is actually moving: we are only simulating movement via animation and relative viewpoints.
Today, we are going to see how to create and actually move objects on this grid to populate our level, and keep a consistent feel of…
What really is free will?
Yesterday, I started to talk about agency, this “feeling that you are in control” and that your actions can have an impact on your environment. In particular, I mentioned how games can help us understand when choices are meaningful and how they teach us this power of decision.
Let’s continue with a focus on the links between games and real-life, and on false choices and manipulation.
Today, we are going to see how we what learnt through games in terms of agency can be translated to real-life. …
What really is free will?
When we think about conditioning, something that we usually have difficulty with is the idea that some external force is deciding for us; that we have essentially lost our power of action. This ability to choose and influence the events in our life can be called “agency”.
But, wait, this is sort of an umbrella term … so— what exactly is agency?
In this duo of articles, I want to talk a bit about this concept and also about how games can help us get a feel for it. In this first part, I’ll talk about the notion of agency…
Discover a virtual Parisian gallery made entirely in CG lit by a sweet sunrise!
To follow up last week’s CG render of the virtual gallery that I am currently building with Cali Rezo to showcase her artwork, here is a new contemplative video of the sun bathing some paintings.
Once again, this is a nice opportunity to take the complete opposite of our first gallery renders: instead of pacing around to show the entire architecture, here we rather wanted to get the viewers to rest for a while in front of the paintings.
This 10-seconds movie exhibits 2 paintings by Cali (100x100cm) in a nice pinkish sunrise light — make sure to watch until…
Let’s continue our RTS game and implement a custom input manager for some shortcuts!
⬅️ Tutorial #27: Levelling up our units! 2/2| TOC
🚀 Find the code of this tutorial series on my Github!
In the last couple of tutorials, we’ve been working on our units and the upgrade system. Today, we’re going to switch gears and go back to something a bit more “meta”: adding shortcuts to make some actions quicker to access.
In this tutorial, we’ll see how to create our own custom input system — it shall be easy to define for programmers and customisable in the settings panel by the players (so it needs to allow for re-mapping).
Let’s get…
Here’s a little animation I made in 1h to play around with Blender object constraints!
A couple of weeks ago, I showed a little “kitschy” dancing man that I’d made in Blender as a 1h-challenge to discover how to use various modifiers and the vertex colouring feature. Today, here’s another time-constrained standalone render: this time, I made a set of gears and mechanical worm in 1h.
The final result are two 5-seconds animation that loop, a “dark” and a “light” version ;)
About this render
Creating the gears
Modelling a gear can get pretty tiresome — unless you take advantage of some Blender addons, and in particular the “Extra Objects” module!
Did you know you can create your own panels in Blender using the Python API?
A couple of weeks ago, I talked about a nice feature of Blender, the open-source 3D soft: the possibility to do some Python scripting to automate tasks! In this previous post, I focused on how we can use the API to instantiate objects, create shaders or materials on the fly and even define some animation curves.
Today, I want to introduce another cool feature of this programmer approach to Blender: the ability to create your own windows and panels :)
Why should you create your own tools?
When you create a piece of software, an essential question you have to ask yourself is who you are designing…
Let’s keep working on our web runner game and add an infinite plane with a little trick that relies on shaders!
⬅️ Tutorial #3: Modelling our spaceship| TOC |Tutorial #5: Spawning obstacles and bonuses ➡️
In the previous episode, we improved the architecture of our project and we had the game instance fully handle the initialisation of the 3D scene. Also, we created our little spaceship using Three.js buffer geometries.
Today, we’re going to add a grid in our scene. This grid will allow us to “feel” the movement — because for now, this big black screen doesn’t give us any indication on the current speed of our ship… and we want this grid to be infinite, because we’re making an…
Mina Pêcheux
I’m a freelance full-stack web & game developer. I’m passionate about topics like CGI, music, data science and more! Find me at: https://minapecheux.com :)
