Gameplay Scripting

Gameplay Scripting - Report

As someone who had never worked with Unity before I was initially very excited to start this module.

Honestly, I felt quite ambitious to start with, but I wanted to keep things simple to start with seeing 

as this was my first time working with the engine and learning to write code in C# for the first time.

So, to get a hang of the basics, for my first project I followed a tutorial video from Mark Brown* from 

“Game Maker’s Toolkit” to make my first game in Unity. This tutorial was to make a simple clone of 

the game “Flappy Bird” and covered a surprising amount of the basics with working in Unity.

My game, which I called “Dappy Flurd” was made to my liking with custom assets, as Mark had 

recommended in his video as he called it “more fun” that way. This set a theme for my next two 

games I would make as I rather enjoyed making my own art despite not being a well-versed artist; I 

created all the art for this module.

To Mark’s credit, creating my own art was very fun, though I can’t help but think that I could’ve 

created and finished more ambitious projects if I had used and credited pre-made art assets from 

elsewhere. I can’t deny that creating my own art took away from valuable time I could’ve spent on 

scripting, which of course was the focus of the success criteria.

For my second game I created “Chomp” a 2D side-scrolling fish game where you must eat as many 

tasty fish eggs as possible without being hit by any spiky urchins. This is where I was thrown 

completely into the deep-end as I did not rely on any sort of tutorial to create it. However, the 

concept itself was actually one that I had already created in the past (the first time being when I was 

eleven years old) using “Scratch” which is a very bare-bones game creation tool used to teach kids 

how to code with visual scripting at a very basic level.

Fortunately, a lot of what I had learnt from making my first game translated into the making of 

“Chomp” since Mark Brown’s tutorial had already covered collisions with objects and what to do 

following that whether it be gaining a point, or losing the game, etc. this was simply just a new 

context for those interactions to be taking place. From there I was able to experiment with other 

gameplay features such as tweaking the movement of the objects (fish eggs and urchins) coming 

from the right side of the screen as well as adding some further code which would progressively 

increase the speed of the game as the player’s score went up.

“Chomp” paired with my first game, “Dappy Flurd” and third game, “Space Junk” (also inspired from 

an old Scratch game of mine) came to make my full line-up of projects I submitted for Gameplay 

Scripting. Since I had three games, I had to merge the three projects since the module was limited to 

a submission of two sets of project files. This was where I ran into some issues because I had 

forgotten I had created scripts with the same name in each of my projects such as the “Logic Script” 

and they had overwritten each other. For this reason, I had to go about rewriting my scripts in order 

to get my games running as intended, as the logic script declared essential functions such as keeping 

track of the player’s score and declaring when the game was over.

In hindsight, it would’ve made more sense to create all these games in one project to start with and 

had them share scripts that declared the same/similar functions. There is a lot of repeated code in 

my final project because of that. However, in conclusion, I am happy with how my final submission 

turned out despite feeling as though there is a slight amount of missed potential since my games are 

fairly non-ambitious. In the future I am looking to ease myself into some more ambitious concepts.