First level, Player Character and Animations

Figure 1

 The first step for this week’s goal was to think of a way to implement my level. At first, I thought that my only option would be to drag and drop each individual sprite into the level. Not only would this have been very time consuming, but it would have also meant that editing the level would have been a lot of effort. This is when I stumbled upon a great tutorial by YouTube user quill18creates. This method involves creating a single sprite, with individual pixels representing the colour of the object which will be placed in world space. An array is made storing all 32-bit colour values (RGB 0 – 255) and it searches the sprite for those colours. These colours each correspond to their own prefab, which will be instantiated, depending where the colour was on the sprite. The sprite that I have created is shown below (fig. 1):

Figure 2

I created the sprite with colours that correspond to their respective ore colours, that way it’s easier to see which ores will spawn at which locations.

Figure 3

To make this work, I had to import all my sprites, creates prefabs out of them (a prefabricated object which acts like a mould / template) and then drag them into the array elements in the Unity inspector. For each of the ores I added a box collider so that it can detect collisions. This allows the player to stand on them and will be used when the mining mechanic is implemented.

Once the level was in place it was time to implement the Player Character and animations. This will enable me to be able to walk around my newly implemented level and open doors to some of the more juicer programming. Implementing the character was easy using the animation and animator windows within Unity.

The animator tool uses ‘States’ and ‘Parameters’ to work. States are the current form or standing that the object is in, while the parameters are conditions which help to transition between those states. I found that these states work better if there is a ‘base’ state – by which I mean a state which is default, has no animations attached to it, and can transition to any state depending on whether the parameters have been met, for this I called it ‘Player_Idle’. After creating the ‘Player_Walk’ animation (fig. 3), I simply then dragged this animation into the animator window and added the parameter of ‘isIdle’, which will transition to the walk state if it’s false. The final step was to add the code for the movement and voila! Our player can now move around the level!