Outside the Box Project Beta Work - Sorting Out Camera Position For Working Build

Having built 3 more variants of the game after our December milestone/presentation to our tutors and Steve Goss. We returned to the project Post-Christmas break and we had a choice to make on which variant of the game we would like to proceed with for the Beta stage of the project (terms 2 and 3 of our final academic year) all the way to our final deadline/hand-in (barring design choices made during Project Beta).

We chose to proceed by developing on the Outpost variant of the 3 variants mentioned prior, as seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Figure 2.

Part of our feedback both from tutors and between ourselves in the group was to scale down our vision for the game and to attempt to "perfect", as best we could, the first level of the game, from which all other levels could be based on.

We decided then to drop the outpost mechanic, despite having implemented it, and just focus on the raw experience of a Tower Defence game by building Defences with different mechanics to protect the main base from waves of enemies.

Our main priority then was deciding on a viewpoint for us as developers and consequently the player that would be used for the final build of the game and for the working Unity projects.

To that end I rebuilt the game in a brand new Unity project, so as to not be swamped with files and older formats that we may not have any more need for, this also gave me an opportunity to clean up the Folder naming structure as seen in Figure 5. Re-imported the necessary assets, such as the player base, imported our core scripts from the previous term (such as the enemy spawn and movement and the entire defence building system) and positioned the camera in this new scene in the same position as it was in the Outpost level variant from Figure 1.

This can be seen in Figure 2.

Figure 3.

After fiddling with the camera's Transform for a while I came to decide that the way the scene was presented in Figure 3. would be how our game would be seen and positioned for the foreseeable future of the project. The main difference between our original view and Figure 3.'s view was the shift from a Perspective camera to an Orthographic camera, I made this change as it prevented the camera from "seeing more than it should" by viewing the empty void of the Unity editor. That and this view is a lot more dynamic than the previous perspective view, shows off more detail of my models and makes it feel more focused on 2 point of the screen; where the player should defend and where the enemies should attack (marked out by the Base the tree, respectively).

Figure 4.

The implementation of a few textures in Figure 4. cemented my opinion and the opinion of the rest of my team that this should be the view of our game.

Figure 5.

Figure 5. here just shows the clean, tidy file format I created for the Unity project which persisted throughout the rest of Project Beta and my final 2 terms, all the way to our final deadline.