Paddle Harder

Overview

This project is my first original game. I admit -- it's pretty terrible. But at least it's something. The goal of the game is to maneuver around rocks without hitting them. If you hit the rocks 3 times you sink. The controls use the keyboard up/down/left/right keys. You can combine vertical/horizontal movement to move diagonally (e.g. left arrow + up arrow moves you diagonally up and to the left).

Objective

The main objective was to build a game from scratch with Unity. The previous game I built was based on a Unity tutorial so this was my time to shine building something of my own with what I'd learned.

Description

This game uses prefab assets from the Unity store. For the rocks and the boat. Inside the boat sits a guy based on the Mixamo "Brute" character. The hardest part of the project was probably the animation of the rowing motion. I tried to implement physics-based rowing motion with inverse kinematics but ended up animating with forward kinematics. Some basic particle effects are used for the splashes. The rock hazards that you must avoid are generated from an object pool of several random rock types. As time goes by the number of instantiated rocks increases. Object colliders keep the player in view of the camera. When the player hits a rock, basic impact audio is played and player health is decremented by 1. When the player reaches 0 lives, the boat is sunk below the water level out of view and the "Sunk" UI element pops up momentarily before asking if you want to start a new game.

Yes, the hearts indicating player health are too large because I didn't set the Canvas Scaler UI Scale Mode to "Scale With Screen Size"...it's on the todo list if I ever revisit this project.