I opened up Unity and made a new 2D project so that I could make a start on my game. I inserted my already drawn background image onto the scene and moved it around until it fits nicely with the main camera.
Even though the Background image overlaps the camera frame it is okay, this is because if I tried to fit it perfectly and then pressed Play on the scene there will be blue edges from where the Background image doesn't align properly.
As this game is a platformer game I need to add some platforms and for this, I will be using some tileset I have drawn using Procreate on my IPAD, references to how I drew these will be in the 'Game Design and 2D Art ' blog. So to see if my pre-drawn tilesets look okay when slotted together I tried aligning them in photoshop and to my dismay, I made an awful mistake where the sand at the top doesn't link up, so I had to redraw some parts of the tiles.
It just looks rather messy and I genuinely wanted my game to look aesthetically pleasing and not disorderly. Once re-drawn, I tried to add the tile to the actual unity scene and then realized that the highlighting I had added to the tiles didn't look quite so right either and that it is also very hard to try and align little squares to be perfectly snapped together. I opted to erase the highlighting and align the tiles in Procreate using the drawing assist (which are little boxes that help you draw nice perfect lines, or they help you have pictures at the exact same level as other pictures).
I did some research and found out that you can convert your tilesets into a neat little tilemap kit where you can select the tiles and practically paint them onto the scene, it comes equipped with a grid and preset rigid bodies after you've sliced the tileset up in the sprite editor which means they can be perfectly slotted together with no cracks.
I set up the Tile Palette with my tilesets and it looked really promising until I realized that the tiles are 3 times the size they were meant to be, I tried adjusting some elements such as the size in the sprite editor but I couldn't find a way to solve the issue. So I opted to go for mathematically aligning the tiles so they are perfect to the number and hopefully won't show any cracks.
Here I am aligning the tiles manually on my scene, I had also lined up the floating platforms in Procreate so as to minimize cracks in the tile alignments. After this I make sure to double-check that the tiles and platforms all have colliders on them, this is important because when the player spawns in they do not want to instantly fall through the floor. I have also added the Characters to my scene. I need to complete the construction of my ground so that the Cowboy will be able to reach the other side.
I have two Robbers to try and provide more of a challenge for the player. I am able to add multiple Robbers as I have made prefabs of both the Robber and Cowboy, which would be really useful in the future if I was to make more levels/scenes. In the scene, I have made it so that one of the Robber is slightly quicker just to heighten the difficulty a little.
I have now completed the platforms/ ground. In all fairness, the scene looks quite dull and basic so I feel like I need to add some things to liven up the scene. I added some text so the player knows what keys to press to play the game.
Because I felt like the game needed something else I decided to draw some in-game objects and scenery just to liven the game up and add some more colour. References to my drawings can be found in my blog titled 'Game Design and 2D Art'.
I've added a couple of bits of scenery and I even tried to play around with adding another platform. The game scene still looks really barren and just empty. I'm not too sure about the extra platform so I might just take it away depending on it's usefulness.
Now that I've added a little more scenery I think the game scene looks much better than what it looked like without the scenery, I'm happy with how much the scenery actually makes a difference to the way the game appears. Next, I will be adding some box colliders to the Cactuses so that the player can eventually die to them.
Last but not least I will be adding colliders to the sides of the game and between the ground at the bottom; so the player can't fall off the sides and so that if the player falls down the little pits he can respawn and the Respawn() function depends on the Cowboy 'colliding' with the pits.
Below is a screenshot of the Hierarchy to show how I grouped everything in my scene to keep it neat and orderly. By keeping all the right things together I was able to access what I needed when I needed it without searching for 5 minutes to find it.
My scene construction and my 2D side-viewed game are complete, I'm really pleased with my efforts at producing this game; I didn't expect the game to turn out so well. Despite not being able to follow my brief to the word I still feel that the game semi follows the original concept ideas, I didn't get to make the Cowboy a detective or do anything else like extra added house levels but I'm not mad. Lastly, I will record a playthrough of the game to show the gameplay footage.
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