Well, just the end of the book. Hopefully I can muster up enough motivation to keep up my Unity education and build something worth a damn.

So it’s been a week, busy week, since the last post about menus. Well, they pretty much wrapped the game up. From there it was just tweaking and optimization. We added a fog and a draw clipping plane (nothing too far out will be drawn, and instead you’ll see fog) as well as a throwing trail for the coconuts. The volcano now smokes and emits a rumbling sound that increases as you get near to it. We finally put in the instruction screen and made a win message that’ll hurl you back to the main menu.

I guess there’s not a lot to explain about it. Here’s the full game!

Click for the final version!

Ladies and gentlemen we’re only one chapter from the soft ending of the book. Chapter 9 pretty much tidies everything up and then 10 and 11 are extra info about how to build (which I’ve been doing since chapter 1) and where to go from there.

So here’s chapter 8′s other menu system. I suppose this one is preferred for most applications but it’s just a little harder to achieve the same graphical representation as the first demo. This one lets you do so much more though, and keeps everything nicely styled!

Here’s what it looks like I guess, it’s nothing majorly different from the other demo except for some behind the scenes stuff.

Click here for the Alternative menu.

There are 2 ways to do menus, it seems. One by basically clicking pretty pictures (I like this way!) and one by using a lot of script (Uh ohhh). Obviously the one with all the script pays off better in the end due to reusability. We make a new scene (‘level’ in laymans terms) and eliminate anything we don’t want on the main menu. Out with the FPS controller, out with the shack, and out with everything but the island.

From there we add a bunch of GUITextures for our buttons and add some incredibly simple scripting to check if we are hovering over the buttons, clicking down on the buttons, or releasing the click over the button. These are all achieved using built-in Unity functions.

There’s really not much more than that to it. We have a quit button that obviously won’t work in the webplayer, so I built a TEST BUILD standalone version which lets you change graphics settings and everything. It’s 10mb, try it out.

Or: the web player version.

Click here for Main Menu, version 1.

NOTE: The Instruction button has not been implemented yet.

This chapter was pretty light compared to the last one. Most of it took place in the actual Unity editor rather than in notepad++. I was tasked with making a firepit, then starting it on fire. Then making that fire smoke.

Here’s what it takes to make a particle emitter in Unity:

Sure, there are a lot of numbers there. But it’s all super simple stuff! Min/Max Size, how big the particles should be. Velocities are how fast they should travel and in what direction. It’s all mostly common sense. Even if it wasn’t the Unity Editor handily shows you a live preview of your particle emitter so you always know what you’re doing.

So we basically went through and tweaked up both of our particle emitters to emulate the look of fire (for the pit) and smoke (for the fire!)

How is the player going to start that fire? Well he needs to get some matches which now reside inside of the house. Get the batteries (I added another one so you don’t have to play the target game if you don’t want to, also speeds up testing for me) and open the door. When you pick up the matches I call a GUI with a little Match icon on it. When you’ve got the matches you just run up to the fire. We check if the player collider is hitting the fire collider, if it is, destroy the GUI, trigger the emitters and sound, and boom. You’re done.

Here’s the demo:

Click here for Demo!