For this assignment, I watched videos at Lynda.com and learned something about design basics in unity. Since all we learned in the class is the basic knowledge about unity, I want to get a deeper understanding of it.

The instructor Adam Crespi illustrated the design basics from five aspects: planning the level, designing the building blocks, laying out levels, adding animation to bring the world to life and implementing user interaction elements. He pushed me to think something that I’ve never thought or just ignored before. Firstly, he said that we should plan the player path in a directed level in a game. We want the player to have a mission and be able to achieve it and succeed on it. Even in an open world, or a sandbox where everyone can simply run around, there’s some kind of mission available or direction we can put in. That’s true. No player just wants to see the scene you created and did nothing, game should be interactive and able to bring you the sense of achievement.

He also pointed out a big consideration when constructing the level, that is the size and field of vide of the player controller. Because we hope that the players can involve and immerse in the game experience, we don’t want them to feel disconnected with the real world. Thus, we need to think about how we are presenting our game to them from our camera. We should create and build the sceneries based on the view of an average-height person. According to the instructor, a box is the cheapest, in terms of draw calls and resources, collider to use. It is a good height marker and size marker. We can put boxes into the scenery and measure other objects.

Though I didn’t do a unity project for my final assignment, I applied the knowledge I learned to the former unity projects. When creating the unity scenes, I was very careful about the size of every object that I put in. I tested my games again and again to make sure all the objects looked real, or at least not weird. I also tried to let the players to interact with the objects. I must say that I couldn’t achieve much without taking the online courses.

Here is the link of the course:

https://www.lynda.com/Unity-3D-tutorials/Using-modular-elements/133341/141482-4.html?srchtrk=index%3a26%0alinktypeid%3a2%0aq%3aunity%0apage%3a1%0as%3arelevance%0asa%3atrue%0aproducttypeid%3a2