Kyle Banks

Sorry about That

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There are many options for rotating GameObjects in Unity, but each has their own limitation. What if you want to have an object turn to look in a direction (left, right, down, up, etc.) or look at a specific world point, such as another object of interest, and you want to accomplish this dynamically at runtime and with animations so that your objects don’t snap to a new rotation but rather rotate over time?
The NavMeshAgent component prepares and NPC with steering properties like speed, acceleration and stopping distance, as well as obstacle avoidance parameters so you can finely tune your NPC behaviors. One thing that doesn't work out of the box is synchronizing with an Animator so you can have your character walk, run, and idle animations playing as they move about the scene. Keeping your NavMeshAgent and Animator*synchronized is pretty easy though, so don't worry.
Back in May I started a series of posts about a 2.5D platforming game I’ve been, or rather was, working on called Siren Song. This is a game I started back in March and while I’m pretty proud of what it’s become from a personal growth perspective, as it’s the most sophisticated game I’ve ever made, I’m sadly ending it where it is now.
As great as Shader Graph is, Unity is obviously unable to pack every function you could ever want or need into their graph. It's just not practical to expect that the tool is going to be able to solve every use case that developers can come up with, which means at some point you might end up needing to write your own functions.
Most everyone knows that publicly exposing your MonoBehaviour variables in Unity allows you to modify them in the Inspector window of the Unity editor. This is really helpful for tuning and adjusting parameters without having to modify code, and allows you to more easily reuse MonoBehaviour classes across objects where you may want different values. But how do you access private or protected properties?
In some of my more recent posts I began a series where I’d recreate effects from popular games using Shader Graph in Unity. The first of these was to create the static effect when a character receives damage in the excellent Axiom Verge. Well just a couple posts in I’ve decided to break from that theme and instead highlight some common effects seen in many games, without focusing on a specific game in particular.
Two weeks ago my wife and I participated in the GMTK Game Jam 2020, a 48-hour online game jam where the goal was to develop a game that fit a particular theme announced at the start of the jam. Over 18,000 people signed up for the jam and in the end over 5,400 games were submitted, making it the largest online game jam ever.
This post is a continuation of Sprite Shader Effects with Unity and Shader Graph, Part 1 where we started by creating a simple sprite rendering shader in Unity’s Shader Graph. If you’re already familiar with Shader Graph then I don’t expect you’ll need to go through Part 1 to understand what’s going on here. But, if you haven’t used Shader Graph or the new Sprite Lit Graph shader template, or just need a refresher, then...
Shaders, those mysterious programs that somehow instruct the GPU how to render objects and effects in our games, are a great way to introduce effects that make your game stand out from the crowd. However it can be quite daunting figuring out where to start and how to write even the simplest shaders. They’re written in esoteric languages and have a variety of peculiarities that make them difficult to pick up, but because they’re so...
It’s been about a week and a half since I first wrote about Siren Song, the 2.5D platforming/survival game I’ve been working on. Since then I’ve accomplished quite a bit, including a full rewrite of the movement systems, implementing the dive computer, tracking and limiting oxygen use with an exertion system, and a whole lot of work on adding in hazards like sharks, octopuses, fire coral, sea urchins, and more.