Journal Entry #14 - Marbles, Marbles, Marbles

As I was fiddling around with the idea of paying homage to various objects, I happened to walk by a pet store which sold fish in my neighbourhood and found that they were still selling the marbles that I used to collect as a kid in Primary School.

LOVED THESE

I recalled how we used to have names for all of these marbles and we'd spend hours playing these at the school courtyard. We would aim to hit other players' marbles and winners would take the marbles they hit home as trophies. It was a fine game to play and I was proud to own marbles of distinct rarity since I was quite good at it.

I began to consider possible platforms to which I could use to pay homage to this particular game.

That's when I realized I could utilise Unity (a game creating software I've been working with as a programmer which utilises C# scripts to implement on the Unity game engine) and harness its abilities to make a walk-up-and-use project (note: I frequently saw walk-up-and-use exhibits during Random Blends last week and it was certainly inspiring).

I began to code the scripts I needed and the prefabs I required to generate the game. The following includes the process of making the game. (Warning: Boring coding stuff included).

It was a pretty simple game to create and I decided to do it on Unity's 3D engine, to create a more immersive play for the user. I wanted the user to be able to control one of the marbles in the game similar to how we all used to be able to control our own.

Code for PlayerController

I utilised a simple directional script so that the player would be able to control the movement of the marble with arrow keys. Next, I wanted the camera to follow the player's marble so that it doesn't go fall out of screen when the player moves around the board to hit the other marbles.

Camera Controller

The camera now follows the player around, so now it was time to implement colliders so that the player can actually hit the surrounding marbles. At the same time I needed to create the prefabs and materials for the actual sprites of the marbles themselves.

Various marble prefabs + using the Unity game engine

After generating the multiple marble sprites I needed, I simply added the necessary elements to ensure that the hits work.

Gameplay at work

And voila! I was done with the base game mechanic for the project. I intend to further improve on this project after feedback and I'll take notes to see if I should even further this concept for the final assignment.

Thanks for reading!