John’s Customized Collectibles

Meet John! He’s part of our Accelerate program here at Game-U, and he teamed up with Jason, one of our instructors, to learn more about game design. John and Jason have a special kind of class since they don’t have to meet in person for lessons. Jason works with John remotely! One of their latest projects involved the Space Flight Ring lesson in Unity, a professional-level gaming engine. John wanted to customize the blue space ring collectibles already present in the game, so Jason showed him Tinkercad.  Never heard of Tinkercad? That’s got to change! Tinkercad allows its users – like John and Jason – to build 3D models that can then be printed. (We do a lot of 3D printing here at Game-U.) Tinkercad let John easily obtain number models, which he and Jason exported into Unity. Think John’s all done now? Not quite so fast! He and Jason dug into some technical details to swap out the space rings with the numbers. Games use something called “mesh,” to express what skin an object or a character is wearing at the time. John got into the blue collectibles’ settings to change their mesh to the number models. Then, he resized the box colliders and turned off the animator function, so that instead of flying his spaceship through the rings, he could see and collect the numbers. Nice job, John! Jason also showed John how to duplicate the number models and place them all over the game map, so that as John plays the game and navigates the spaceship, he can find and capture all the new collectibles. John changed just one more detail. He modified the line of instruction at the top left corner of the game screen to tell the player to “Collect all the numbers,” rather than “Fly through the rings.” Next class John and Jason will learn even more about Unity and what can be done with Unity materials. Check back soon to follow along with John’s progress!