Bowling with Unity Part 1 of 3

In this section of our Bowling with Game Engines series, we will be implementing our bowling game in Unity. The idea is straight forward, implement the same simple 3D game across a number of game engines.  The Unity game engine is a logical place to start, as it is perhaps the most popular game engine in use today.  We will go step by step through the process of creating our game, both in text as well as a video version available here.   I am not a regular Unity user, so please do keep in mind, a lot of what I am about to show may not be best practice!  All of the assets used in this tutorial are available for Patreons as part of the bowling game kit, along with project files and this document in PDF form.  Don’t worry, these aren’t needed to follow along.

Let’s jump in.  Fire up Unity and create a new project.  In this example I am using Unity 5.6.1, however, any recent version should work.

First, let’s start by dragging all of our required assets into Unity.  Simply select all of the game assets you will be using (FBX models, textures, audio files) and drag and drop them from Explorer or Finder into the assets folder.  If you are using the Patreon assets, simply copy the contents of Raw Assets in the Unity project folder.

Unity does an extremely good job of importing assets and you should require no additional steps.  We now have all of the assets we are going to need to create our game, let’s get started.

Creating the Title Screen

First, we are going to start by creating a simple title screen with some awful looping background music.  We will be using our default scene for the splash screen and later we will create another scene for our actual gameplay.  We start off by saving our untitled scene.  Simply select File->Save Scene As…

I saved it as TitleScreen. You should now have a new item in your assets list:

We now have a few setup tasks to take.  We are going to be showing our title image and this requires us to alter the Main Camera entity. In Hierarchy panel select Main Camera, then in Inspector we change Clear Flags to Don’t Clear.

This causes our camera to no longer have perspective ( things aren’t drawn smaller the farther away they get from the camera ).  Generally, an Orthographic camera is what you use when working in 2D in a 3D world. Setting Clear Flags to don’t clear simply causes the default skybox to not be drawn, we could have optionally defined a background clear colour if we preferred.

Now in Hierarchy panel, click the Create button, select UI->Canvas.  Next, with the newly created Canvas selected, click Create again, and this time select UI->Panel.  At this point, we should have this hierarchy.

Next, we have to make a slight modification to our imported Titlescreen image.  Select the Tilescreen.png image file in the assets view, then in Inspector change Texture Type to Sprite (2D and UI).  Then scroll down in the Inspector and click the Apply button.

Next select Panel in the Hierarchy view, and drag our newly created Sprite over to the Source Image section in the Image (Script) section.

If you press Play now, you should see your Title screen in the viewport.

Now let’s add a looping music file to our title screen.  In the Hierarchy view, select the Canvas entity.  Then in inspector scroll down and click Add Component, then Audio->Audio Source.

In the newly created Audio Source in Inspector, drag our imported audio file over to the audio clip section.  Down below, make sure Play on Awake is set and then tick the box next to Loop.

Ok, we now have a title screen and a soundtrack playing!  Good work so far… now let’s add a simple script that changes scenes on click. Let’s create our script.  Right click in the Assets area, select Create-> C# Script.

Name it PanelScript.cs.

Double click the newly created script file and it will open in your editor of choice.  Now enter the following code:

using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using UnityEngine;
using UnityEngine.SceneManagement;

public class PanelScript : MonoBehaviour {

   // Use this for initialization
   void Start () {
      
   }
   
   // Update is called once per frame
   void Update () {
        if (Input.GetMouseButtonUp(0))
            SceneManager.LoadScene("GameScene");
    }
}

Here we are simply checking every single pass through the game loop if the Left (0^th) mouse button (or touch) is clicked, and if it is, we load the scene named “GameScene”.

Hmm… guess we should make a scene called GameScene now shouldn’t we?  Once again right click the Assets panel, then select Create->Scene.

Rename the newly created Scene to GameScene.

We are now done with our title screen scene.  Make sure you save.  Before we open our newly created GameScene, we have one last step to perform.  In the File menu, select Build Settings…, then select Add Open Scenes.

Now double click our newly created GameScene to open it up.  If prompted to save, do so.  Now it’s time to create our game!

Click here to continue to part two!

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