Day 3 — Space Shooter 2D — Project Setup

THE ALEINS ARE COMING…sort of.

The first project I am working on is a 2D space shooter game that reminds me of a childhood favorite — Galaga. I played this arcade game in the 1980s for hours at a time. Ah…the good old days. Now I get to make my own addictive games!

So the first step is to install the Unity game engine, Visual Studio for writing the scripts, and download the game assets I will need for the visuals. I am not going to write a tutorial on installing Unity or Unity Hub. There are thousands of those online. But I will mention some tips and tricks I have learned while working with Unity.

The first is the window layout. While there is no one perfect layout, I have found this one to work for almost all of my development needs.

Having the Hierarchy and Project windows stacked next to the Inspector window makes it very easy to drag and drop items into the Inspector fields when necessary. Being able to see the game view and the scene view helps when placing or moving objects as well. I also like to have the Animator and Animation windows in different spots so that I can see them both if needed.

One other very important setting I would recommend looking at is the Playmode Tint under the Colors section of Unity Preferences.

Unity does not save changes when you are in Run mode. Therefore, changing the Playmode Tint is a very good visual reminder. It changes the editor’s color but does not change the scene or game views.

See the stark difference? Very handy. Very handy indeed.

Okay. So I have the project setup and ready to start. I have created a Github repository for version control, and I have snacks and drinks ready to go.

Tomorrow, I will begin with the Player setup. See you there! 😁