Unite 2013 Training Day

While Day #1 of Unite 2013 kicked off yesterday in Vancouver, Tuesday was the Training Day and it was fantastic! The session was run by two of the guys from the Learn team: Ben Pitt & Will Goldstone. To start you off you were handed a nice 8GB USB key (with the Unity logo on it) that contained the installers for Unity 4.2 (required for the Training Day, which was nice as I had 4.1.5 installed) and then all the content needed to follow along with the tutorial and create a game.

There was A LOT of content covered in the course, so I apologize of parts of this post are vague.

The session started off with an introduction to the Unity Editor which took you through all the components of the Editor and customization options such as changing the colour of the Editor when in Play mode.To do this, follow these steps: 

1. Launch Unity then click on "Edit > Preferences".

2. Click on the "Colors" tab on the left-hand side and you will see the "Playmode tint" option under the "General" heading.

3. Click on the colour bar (in green above) and you will be presented with the colour picker. You can either pick your colour, or type in the RGB code.

4. Once done, click the "X" in the top right hand corner of the box, then click the "Play" button in the Editor to check your change.



After the Editor Refresher came some instruction on Adding Assets and then Level Prototyping. The Level Prototyping took us through how to quickly build up some floor spaces and using the Duplicate tools.The floor space we laid out was the start of a castle that was the game play area for what we were creating.

Then it was on to Editor Scripting. A handy script surrounded the floor with the provided walls and towers and we were good to go. Below is a screenshot of the finished castle that was provided.

Another handy part of the training was that the team provided us with pre-built scenes so if anything went horribly wrong, or we were struggling to keep up, then we could just load the relevant scene.



Once the walls were created we moved on to lighting and using sky boxes before a break.

The session started again with physics and creating a basic 3D capsule that was used as the basis for our main character, with some controls added. Boxes were added to the scene, and also had physics applied so that the player could knock them over.

After this came cameras and we attached a camera to the model to follow around the player. This camera was later replace by a more advance camera that chased the player and had collision detection so that it would avoid walls, etc.

Then we made some Coin objects that the player could pick up, and prefabs were introduced to take care of this. Then a basic GUI was created to display the amount o coins remaining to be collected. The coin collection was then expanded upon by creating a particle effect that would display once the coin was collected.

Once this was complete it was time for lunch!

We returned to talk about Character Animation and the (now integrated) Mecanim features were shown off. It was amazing to see that animations could be imported into Unity, and then applied to models. This is a great time-saver as you do not have to create the same animations on all your characters when you create them, but just import the animation into Unity and then apply the one animation to all your characters. This is backed by State Machines so you can state which animations feed into each other.

You can also layer in animations so that if you want a player to be able to complete 2 actions at one (for example: run and throw) then you can layer the 2 animations so that they can still play at the same time. You do this by selecting which parts of the character you want to exclude from the animation, for example: if you are using a throw animation (like we did) then you will layer the throw action over whatever other animation is playing, but to display both the animations then you would only want to display the parts of the body that are affected by the throw action, such as the head, torso and the arm that is doing the throwing.

Here's more on animation.

Oh, and there's also Blend Trees for animation too!

To complete the animation portion we replaced our sphere with the Ethan character that was provided (this was simple to do) and then apply the animations.

After that it was the introduction of Hazards. The ability to tag components in Unity really comes handy here as you can script your character so that if they come in contact with anything tagged "Hazard" then the character will die. So we added this script and added in a call to the Die animation, then respawn the player.

Then it was on to Enemies and Projectiles and we were done! Phew! As I wrote earlier, it was a LOT of content. There were no hold-ups as everyone in the room kept up (there were also multiple "helpers" around the floor to help people out where needed), but the instructors were rushed to get us finished in time.

We were given a link to the training slides, I wasn't told we couldn't give out that link so here it is! I apologize to the Unity team if we weren't supposed to share it, but let me know and I'll take down the link. Also, for readers I cannot say how long the content will be available.