Category Archives: Creators

Congratulations to all our ninjas who received belts in Summer 2017!

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On 27 May 2017, at our final CoderDojo Athenry session of the 2016-17 year, we awarded a total of 93 belts to our ninjas for their great individual achievements in acquiring and demonstrating coding and computing skills. And then we had a party with pizza!

Here is a link to our presentation from the day: CoderDojo Athenry Belts Day 2017

We are very grateful to Clarin College Athenry and the principal, Ciaran Folan, for their enabling CoderDojo Athenry by making the school and its wifi available to us.

We are also very grateful for the sponsorship and support we have received this year:

  • Galway Roscommon Education and Training Board, who provide us with an annual Youth Club Grant
  • Medtronic, employer of our mentor Declan Fox, who provide us with a grant to match Declan’s excellent volunteering
  • HP Enterprise, employer of our mentor Mark Davis, who provide loaner laptops that we make great use of
  • Boston Scientific, employer of our mentor Kevin Madden, who provided us with a set of 3D printers this year, which allowed a great new learning experience

Because of these supports, no child or parent/guardian ever has to pay to participate in CoderDojo Athenry.

This year also, mentor Martha Fahy introduced a new idea, “Java Dojo”, where parents can buy a cup of tea/coffee, providing additional funds. With these, we have been able to buy a speaker system, electronics needed by some of our groups, and our own 3D printer! Thank you, our CoderDojo ninja sidekicks!

And of course we must thank our mentors, who volunteer their time and expertise entirely without charge week after week, to make CoderDojo Athenry the success that it is.

Here is the full list of belts we awarded:

  • Explorers:    44     (39 Yellow & 5 White)
  • Advancers:  18
  • Bodgers:     17
  • Hackers:      8
  • Creators:     5
  • Black Belt:   1

Special mention must go to Eoin Clarke, who received our first ever black belt award. Eoin has been in CoderDojo Athenry for several years, working his way up through the groups, and this year took on the role of Mentor. Well done, Eoin!

Above are some photos of the belts awarded. You can find more on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/CoderDojoAthenry/posts/1465673366786859

CoderDojo Athenry is now closed for the summer. See you all in September!

Creators: Text Based Adventure

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The last two weeks we were looking at something quite different: a text-based adventure system built in Unity. This was inspired by the Henry Stickmin games and also by the old 80s-style choose-your-own-adventure books.

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Basic Program Design (Story Card)

The user is presented with a “story card”. A card consists of some text describing their current situation and (normally) a number of options to choose from.

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Depending on which option they pick, the story branches from there, card-by-card, until it reaches an end (a card with no options).

Setting up a card is straightforward:

Screen Shot 2017-04-05 at 14.15.27.png

You enter the card description (the text the user sees on screen), the text that the user will see on each option button (the program supports up to four at the moment) and the card (or branch, but we’ll get to that later) to jump to when that option is selected.

There’s also the mention of “States to Set True/False” and we’ll explain that next.

Story States & Story Branches

We could have programmed the system entirely using only cards, but there’s one situation where this becomes tedious. Imagine that you have a choice; hitting a button for example. The consequences of this choice won’t become apparent until later in the story. If we only had story cards, then we’d have to branch the story immediately at his point, replicating the same steps on both branches until the point at which the consequences of your action played out.

Fortunately, there is a better way.

First, to remember the value we introduce the idea of a “story state’. It’s just a container for a true or false value. Cards can set the value of specific states when they are activated as seen above.

Screen Shot 2017-04-05 at 14.14.09

So, that covers remembering values, how do we then make use of them? This requires a “story branch”. A branch references a state and two places for the story to go (either of these can be a card or another branch). The value of the state determines which is picked.

Screen Shot 2017-04-05 at 14.19.01

 

Game Manager

This class looks after the story. It is responsible for updating the UI to the details of the current card, for handling the use clicking on specific buttons and generally directing the flow of the story. It also needs a StoryCard to start off the story with.

Screen Shot 2017-04-05 at 14.21.33.png

Project

 

The project, including a very simple story using a number of cards and also a couple of states, can be found here. There are two scenes in the project, Adventure which contain a simple story and Basic which is a good starting place for your own story.

Creators : Breakout / Mouse Controlled Camera

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Screen Shot 2017-03-16 at 15.25.41

This week we looked at a version of the classic game Breakout. It was an exercise in showing how a game developed with 3D assets can, nevertheless, appear like a 2D game given the correct choice of camera and lighting.

The camera for this game is an orthogonal one. Unlike a standard perspective camera, which mimics how we actually see the world, things don’t get smaller as they get further away with an orthogonal camera. This gives a very flat look where we don’t see the edges of the game area, blocks, bat or puck. In addition, the scene has a single directional light which shines directly downwards. Shining straight down means there are no shadows around the sides of the objects as there would be if the light was at an angle.

This game does not use Unity’s physics for the puck movement. I found that the physics just didn’t give the consistent behaviour you’d expect from this game. Accordingly, I programmed the movement of the puck myself. The maths is a little more complex than I’d like but the intention is to keep the puck moving at a constant speed, even after it hits something.

Additionally, we worked quickly on implementing a mouse controlled camera. In the hierarchy, we created a camera rig from two empty objects, one inside the other, and put the camera object inside the second. Changing the Y rotation of the first empty then turned the camera around the vertical while changing the X rotation of the second tilted the camera around horizontal. The visual below show what a real world camera rig that behaved this way might look like; rotating at the base and at a horizontal pivot.

Screen Shot 2017-03-16 at 15.53.28

In our scripts we referenced the usual horizontal and vertical input axes:

     float horiz = Input.GetAxis ("Horizontal");
     float vertical = Input.GetAxis ("Vertical");

but in the Input Manager (Edit|Project Settings|Input) we switched these from the arrow keys to the mouse axes:

 

Screen Shot 2017-03-16 at 15.35.08 (Edited)

The Breakout project can be downloaded here and the mouse controlled camera project can be downloaded here. These projects are both saved with Unity 5.5.2f1, so please use that version or later when opening them.

 

 

 

Creators – Projects

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This week we spoke about possible projects. We also looked at games that you like so that we could draw inspiration from them.

When it comes to projects, there are a few questions you need to ask yourself:

What is the type of game you want to make?

Take a look here for an exhaustive list of game genres: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_genres

What is the setting for your game? Do you have a character in mind?

These choices will determine the look and tone of your game and are good things to decide early on.

What do I already know that will help create my game?

From what we’ve seen already this year, what things will your game need that you already know how to do?

What do I not yet know how to do?

There are things you might like to be able to do that you’re not sure about how to achieve; these are things to raise with your mentor. He’ll focus on these in the next few weeks. Also; check the Asset Store. There are many free things there that might help you complete your game. If you’d ultimately like to do everything yourself, look at these as items as placeholders to get the basic game working that you might eventually replace.

Finally remember:

BE REALISTIC IN YOUR AMBITION

You will find it hard to get time to work on your project and it’s your first project on your own in most cases. The most important things are to show something that is yours and something that is fun. Showing something that is overly complex but that is not fun is not as good.

Get your thinking caps on!

Creators – Unity Terrain

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Screen Shot 2017-01-31 at 22.17.05.png

This week we looked at the Environment asset pack and the creation of terrains.

Terrains are, at their core, nothing more than a grayscale image (shades of black & white) where the colour values are interpreted as representing heights. Black is is interpreted as zero height, white is interpreted as maximum height (as defined in the terrain’s properties) and every shade of grey in-between represents an intermediate value. The terrain editing tools provides brushes in a variety of shapes to raise or lower the terrain as desired.

Terrains in Unity don’t just allow us to define their heights. They also allow the painting of the terrain with a combination of different textures. In the Environment asset pack there are a selection of useful textures for painting a natural looking environment. These are a grass texture, several rocky textures and a sand texture.

Screen Shot 2017-01-31 at 22.18.36.png

Trees and grass are also enclosed in the Environment asset pack. These are also painted onto the texture with a brush, or in the case of trees, autofilled to a requested total number.

Once we had our terrain built, we added a character controller from the Controllers asset pack to enable us to walk around in it. We finished the session experimenting with the water prefabs that come with the Environment pack.

Please note that I won’t be at Dojo next Saturday (4th Feb 2017). Nonetheless, you are welcome to attend and join another group for the day if you wish to do so.

Creators – Finishing Pin Bowling

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This week, despite a small group, we finished off the Pin Bowling game. After Christmas we’ll move onto a different game – most likely something 1st person in design.

UI Elements – Text and Buttons

We added two UI Text elements to our game and aligned them to the top left and top right hand corners respectively. One is used for showing the current score and one is used for showing the number of shots remaining. Note that when we add UI elements, Unity automatically adds a Canvas and an EventSystem for us.

UI elements don’t have a standard Transform component, instead they have a RectTransform component which is used to describe their position within their Canvas. To align to a particular location we click on the square below the words “Rect Transform” and select how we’d like to align within the Canvas by clicking one of the options while holding the Shift and Alt keys to set both the pivot and position.

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Creators – Texturing in Blender & Importing Into Unity

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This week we finished off texturing our bowling pin model in Blender and then imported it into Unity to use in our game.

UV Unwrap

We started by loading our existing bowling pin model with seams already marked.

The process of unwrapping a 3D model is similar to peeling an orange and pressing the skin flat. The seams we marked are like cuts in the orange’s skin. When we peel it, the pieces between the seams come out separated.

To unpeel the model we entered Edit Mode (TAB key), selected the entire model (A key) and chose UV Unwrap | Unwrap from the Mesh menu. Notice that we don’t see impact of this until we switch to the UV/Image Editor

 

Switching to UV/Image Editor

Our main panel is normally in 3D View mode. To start working with our texture we click on the icon to the left of the menu options and choose “UV/Image Editor”.

When we change mode we see a flat image with our model split apart and spread out into flat sections. Each of these sections represents a part of our model between a set of seams.

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Moving Regions Around

Painting

Previewing

Saving Texture to File

Exporting Model from Blender

Importing Model into Unity

Replacing Our Existing Pin Prefab

Test

Creators – Blender

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blender-socket

This week we did some basic modelling in Blender. Blender is a very powerful 3D graphics package that is free and open-source. It is supported across all major desktop platforms.

Blender is so large and fully featured that it can be quite intimidating to learn. Knowledge of a few shortcut keys for common operations can really improve the experience of working with the program. We were indebted to Giuliano D’Angelo’s wonderful Blender shortcut infographic for providing us with some quick reference in this regard:

http://www.giudansky.com/design/51-blender-map

Moving About and Zooming

The first thing we covered in Blender was moving about. Practically speaking, Blender requires a three button mouse to operate. In Blender the middle mouse button (MMB) is used to control the view. Used on its own, it tilts the camera. When used with the SHIFT key, it pans the camera instead. CTRL and the MMB are use to zoom, but this is also more often achieved by scrolling the mouse wheel.

Object Mode and Edit Mode

We used Blender in two modes: Object Mode and Edit Mode. The TAB key can be used to switch between these. In Object Mode we can create, select and reposition objects but we cannot do any detailed editing on them. In Edit Mode, we can do any detailed editing we require on the currently selected object. Note that selecting items in Blender is done with the right mouse button (RMB).

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Creators – Random Pin Placement

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This week we worked on random pin placement for our game. We updated the existing PinManager component to randomly (as opposed to regularly) place a number of pins into the scene.

Arrays

An array is a way for a variable to hold more than one value. It’s a a very useful concept in programming; complex programs would be practically impossible without them. In C# arrays are declared as follows:

     int[] nums = new int[4];
     bool[,] grid = new bool[rows, cols];

The first line creates a one-dimensional array called nums which has four entries: nums[0], nums[1], nums[2] and nums[3].

The second line creates a two-dimensional array called grid. Note the size in this case depends on the values of the variables rows and cols. The first entry is grid[0,0] and the last is grid[rows – 1, cols – 1]. The total number of locations in this array is rows * cols.

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