#ardn706

or How to Exit Infinite Loops in Unity

As game programmers often do, I was working on DEV-WICK, my Game and Play Design project in the early hours of the morning. In an attempt to get the player-coded block stack to process, I wrote a function that called itself, with logic which I presumed would prevent an infinite loop. I quickly learned that that’s too late to intervene—once that function starts calling itself and hangs, there’s no going back. Most programmers would kill the relevant process or alt+F4 at this point, but that wasn’t an option for me—I had forgot to save my in-Unity work from the past hour or so 😬.

After a bit of Googling I learned that there is hope: you can connect Visual Studio, my programming IDE of choice, to Unity, force all running code to break, go into the CPU thread that’s hung, then the call stack, find the relevant script that the program is hung on, then modify a variable to result in the program throwing an exception (in my case, setting the location variable of a nav agent SetDestination(location) function to null). 

Glitch Arcade Game Play

Here’s a short little video of some game play of my final game.

I managed to get all the glitches into one game, just by moving around and adding in a few more pieces of code. Trying to work the animations again was a bit tricky but after a bit of playing around and thinking, I managed to get it to work. 

Had to play around with the speed of everything to make the game a bit more exciting, I think I found the right level of difficulty.

Given more time, I would like to have it increase in difficulty over time. There are also some pieces of code which I think could be done better/more efficiently but they work so no need to change it. For future though, if I ever do some more coding, I should be able to do it better.

Art, Animation, and Music

With the main game mechanics done, I needed to add in some more assets and create some animations. 

Creating the animations in Aseprite was actually pretty easy. The jumble pixel tool made it really easy to create a glitched look. I did a few frames and had them reverse to create a short animation. 

I also did some art for the start menu, which has a very similar glitch animation on it too. I took inspiration from this website, Retro Wave, which allows you to create a vaporwave image. 

Other assets I needed to create were a heart for the lives, and another note for a bit of variety. 

In terms of coding in the animations to play when I want them too, it was a struggle. There was a lot of going back and forth between the code and Unity to make sure each part was communicating correctly, and changing things around to see if it would work with a new technique. Eventually, I was about to give up and went back to something that kind of worked, and for some reason it worked exactly how I wanted. So there’s that.

In terms of the music, I don’t really have an interest in this aspect of the project. I’m not very good with sound and music, but I’m also bad with programming and pixel art, so I chose to focus on those rather than the music. Bit strange considering Vaporwave is more of a music genre, although I’ve taken more of the visual side of the genre. 

I did mess around with trying to create a Vaporwave 8-bit song to loop, but all the attempts were pretty terrible. I tried using an existing vaporwave song to try splice up and make more retro, although there’s no real way to put an effect on it to make it 8-bit (at least in Audacity). I also tried using BeepBox, and created a cute little 8-bit tune but it didn’t really fit the game and I didn’t know how to make it feel more vaporwave. 

I settled on getting one of the most popular Vaporwave songs by Macintosh Plus,  リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー, taking a snippet out of it, and making it sound like it’s glitching out occasionally.

Fleshed Out Game

I’ve managed to create my game! I’ve created three “glitches” for my game; reversed controls, flipping everything upside down, and having things cross the screen horizontally rather than down. 

Next was adding in the little extra bits to make it well rounded. I added in lives for my game, following the tutorials by YouTuber GucioDevs. 

This meant that I should include a game over screen. Using the last video from Sebastian Lague’s tutorials, I made a simple game over screen. This also meant I should create a start screen too. Brackeys tutorial was most helpful for this.

Currently, I have the three glitches within three separate scenes. So, from the start menu, it’ll pick randomly between the three scenes. This works, but I’d much prefer if you could get any of the three glitches within the game, rather than being stuck with one until the next start up. It also means I have a lot more assets than I should have, with three different scripts for the three of the same objects. What I would like to do is to merge these all into one scene, so I will need to go back through all my code and figure out the best way to make it all work. Luckily for me, I’ve been feeling fairly confident with coding now and should be able to fix this with a little bit of time.

Progress - Coding

Coding is something I’ve only really dabbled in a little bit, so coding a full game was definitely going to be challenging for me. I have a small bit of experience with coding in Unity, at least to the point where I can kind of read code and kind of understand what it does.

Lucky for me, Arcade games tend to have very simple mechanics, and mostly in 2D. Less work for me to figure everything out.

My plan of attack for this part of the project is to find, preferably, YouTube tutorials which would take me step by step through the process of what code I need, tell me what exactly it would do, and how it interacts with Unity. 

The YouTube playlist Unity 2D Game Development Tutorials by user Daniel Wood proved to be most helpful to me in this early stage. I familiarised myself with how Unity works and managed to get basic parts of my game together.

From here, it was just finding specific pieces of code that I needed for each aspect of my game. Sebastian Lague had a tutorial for creating falling blocks, which I used for my music notes, and the Unity website itself had many pieces which helped me along with things like using time, and how to call booleans and variables from other scripts. 

I quite enjoy programming, so as one of my genres that I wanted to mix in my Game and Play Design project was the programming video game genre. In this genre you can find games like Human Resource Machine, Zachtronics’ games, and Hacknet (more of a hacking game, to be fair). 

Educational games are often seen to be boring or sub-par when compared to games that are primarily focused on other areas. I want to challenge this idea in DEV-WICK. Arguably, programming games are an evolution of the puzzle game genre, which are technically educational (you’re required to learn new mechanics), although typically have no real-world application, other than say exercising your brain. These games present the player with a problem and the means to solve it—the rest is up to them. 

The video I linked above, by the Youtuber Chadunda, discusses how games teach programming, in particular analyzing the game Human Resource Machine, where players create sorting algorithms and other programs. The game teaches basic programming concepts, in addition to teaching the lesson that algorithms have quality. For instance, in the game TIS-100 (Zachtronics, 2015), players are presented with a graph showing how their algorithm compares with the rest of the players that attempted the very same level. Now things get competitive, and for some, they’re hooked after that, trying to squeeze every last drop of efficiency out of their work in order to top the leaderboards.