#MixedRealities Week 2: Beginning Unity

(Image of the Unity scene view screen)

Unity is a cross-platform game engine created in 2005 by David Helgason, that can be used to create games in both 2D, 3D, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality. The engine is extremely well known by game developers and has been used to create a wide array of games across a wide array of platforms, including: Call of Duty: Mobile, Rimworld, VR chat, and many more.

Unity has a multitude of different features, some of which can seem impossibly complex (to me at least) luckily, in order to create this test project, I only had to worry about a few. The largest of which was the scene and game windows/views, as well as the differences between them. In Unity a scene contains the environment of your game, and essentially starts off as a blank canvas for you to place objects in. The camera is floating, and can essentially move and go anywhere, including inside of objects. In contrast game view represents what a player would see when playing your game, it's camera often has a set of rules, unlike scene view, and all of it's attributes/components can be changed. In order to use game view, a camera component must first be created, and placed onto the scene. Objects in both the scene view and the game view will not be affected by physics until the play button, located at the very top of the screen, in the toolbar, is pressed. Located on the very right hand side of the screen, the inspector window is where all of an objects proprieties are located.

(Play and pause button located at the very top of the screen in the toolbar)

For my Des241 mixed realities, week two project, I created my first scene in Unity. This simple scene involved me creating two different 3d objects (a sphere, and a cube) changing their material to a different color, and applying a new physics propriety to the ball that made it have gravity. This overall took around 20 minutes, mainly due to me having never worked in Unity before. I am excited for what I will create, in the future, in this engine, and am looking forward to learning more of this programs controls and features. I then attempted to make the sphere (ball) bounce, which was definitely the hardest part, and I am extremely grateful to my fellow students for helping me out with this. I eventually made the ball bounce by giving the sphere a couple new components. The first, was rigid-body (added by clicking on the sphere, and in the inspector, adding a new physics component called rigidbody) this made the Sphere able to be influenced by Unity's built in physics engine, meaning it was pulled down by gravity when the game was played. I then added another physics component called sphere collider, which allowed the sphere to have collision with other objects in the scene (notably the cube, which I added it's own collider, called box collider, to) After this, I then added a new asset called physics material, set the bounciness to 0.8 (as I discovered setting it to 1 would make it bounce forever) and dragged this physics material into the physics dropdown box of the previously created Sphere Collider component.

After this all I did was press the play button, and dropped the sphere onto the cube you can see this, in action, in the short video below.

(video of the ball bouncing on the platform)

Overall I am incredibly excited about continuing on with Unity, and have already thought up a number of different projects and games I could create in the software. My experience with Unity so far, while slightly frustrating at points, has overall been a positive one.