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From the course by Michigan State University

Game Development for Modern Platforms

582 ratings

Michigan State University

Game Development for Modern Platforms

582 ratings

Course 4 of 5 in the Specialization Game Design and Development

The device or "platform" that a game is developed for and played on has a massive impact on the game development process. In this hands-on course you will explore how to develop a game for a variety of modern platforms, including Web, Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, and Android. While building a complete game, you will learn intermediate and advanced game development techniques in the Unity game engine. By the end of the course, you will understand how to develop, refine, package, and prepare your game for distribution on a variety of game platforms. Particular attention will be given to developing a 2D platformer game that supports multiple forms of input (keyboard/mouse, controller, and touch), works across multiple forms of output (screen size, screen resolution, sound), and performs well on a variety of computing devices.

From the lesson

Building Out the Game

Hi! This week we will finish our example game, bringing in some visual polish and UI, adding a game manager, and making sure our game controls work across multiple platforms. We will continue to introduce additional design and programming concepts along the way. And, at the end of this week, you will start the process of modifying the game and transforming it into your own creation! How exciting! As always, if you are having troubles with a concept, quiz, or technical issue with Unity or the project, you should post on the Discussion Forum to ask for help. Remember to be a good Coursera community member and help others out when you can. Go! Go! Go!

Out-of-Game Scenes7:08

The Main Menu6:50

Cross Platform Menu Controller Support3:42

Supporting Mobile Cross Platform Input11:34

Meet the Instructors

Brian Winn
Associate Professor
Media and Information

[MUSIC]

In this lecture, we'll take a deeper look at the main menu scene.

Our objectives will be to explore how the main menu scene is setup, and

do a code walkthrough of the Main Menu Manager.

So let's actually open the Main Menu scene.

The Main Menu scene is set up similar to the game lose and game win scenes.

There's a manager game object at the top that's got a script that

controls the menu.

This script is a little bit more sophisticated.

We'll talk about some of the details here in a moment, but

one of the primary things it does is, it controls the Main Menu canvas.

So, if I open this up, notice we've got a number of things here.

We've got a title panel that has Sparty, and the Sparty text in it.

And then we have a menu panel, which has all these buttons,.sS

there's the start game, level select, about game, and a quit game button.

And then we have a couple game objects basically,

what I'm calling panels, that are disabled.

So you can see they're not enabled here in the level select, and the about screen.

So what the manager actually does is, if I play this and

select a button like level select, notice what happens in the hierarchy.

The menu panel got disabled and the level select panel is now enabled.

So the level select panel has this level one button, anime menu button.

If I go back and then click About, notice these two are now the same mode.

About is enabled, and within this, we've got all of this about information.

The instructions, the controls, created by, and the copyright.

So if we actually look at the manager,

you can see there's references to all these things.

So the main menu, there's a reference to the main menu panel,

game objects, the levels menu, the about menu.

We also set up references to default buttons within each of those panels,

so we can activate the default button for keyboard input on the menu.

And then there's also the reference to the Quit button.

So if you notice, when I played this, the Quit button goes away.

Because I'm in the Editor, the Quit button doesn't actually function.

So I dynamically turn on and

turn off the Quit button based on the platform that we're playing on.

In the Editor, we can't quit, so I don't show it.

In the Web Player we can't quit, so I don't show it.

But on Windows or Mac, we actually can quit, so I do show it.

So let's take a very quick look at the Main Menu Manager script.

So like I said, it is a little bit more sophisticated of a script.

Notice I have included a few different namespaces here, because I'm actually

referring to The UnityEngine UI and the EventSystems down below.

So I included those at the top.

We've got a number of public variables here, some of which we set up in awake.

So for example, displayQuitWhenAppropriate is a function down below.

If you look at this, this is kind of a neat thing.

You could say Application.platform, and

it returns the platform that the game is currently running on.

And you can see examples of these things down below for the different cases.

So RuntimePlatform.WindowsPlayer, OS X, Mac OS 10 Player, Linux Player.

So if those are there I actually activate that Quit button that is attached here.

For all the other platforms, I deactivate.

I actually have a default down here, which would catch all of those.

But I put these in here just for your sake, so

you can actually see what these other things might be.

Like Windows Editor, OS 10 Editor, iPhone Player,

OS 10 Web Player, Windows Web Player and Web GL Player.

So if I scroll back up, we have this set level select.

You can see in the comment, disable,

enable level buttons based on player progress.

So this is basically what sets up that level select screen.

So this is probably the most complicated part of the script.

Let me just move this over.

So right now, within the level select panel,

notice that I've got this levels panel, but I have no buttons within in.

As soon as I play notice that the Level 1 button appears here.

And if I go there you can actually see the Level 1 button.

[MUSIC]

So this is part of the Main Menu manager script.

Of course, notice here it says Level Names.

If I open this I can define how many levels are in my game,

because Unity doesn't necessarily know that.

It doesn't know what scenes are levels and what aren't.

So I set my script up here to have an array of strings.

I can define how many levels.

So if I say something like 3, I can then say something like Level 1, Level 2.

And then maybe something like pause battle.

Now if I play, you can see that it will automatically create those buttons there

like a level select.

Now I've got three buttons on those on level one is unlocked,

because I've actually, on level one gets unlocked by default and I play that level.

If I ever play these additional levels,

there's code in the player pref manager to actually unlock the level.

So here in the level select screen of my main menu,

these would then become unlocked.

Now, if they were unlocked and I clicked these,

they wouldn't work because right now they actually load the level based on the name.

So Level 2, our boss battle, they don't exist yet

and they're not in my build settings.

So once I create these, I'd need to make sure that the scene name corresponds to

the button name that I'm creating here.

And of course, we'd also need to make sure that my scene was in my build settings.

[SOUND] So that's how the level select works.

Of course, you can look at the code, walk through the code and see all the things.

Like I said, I added a lot of comments here.

To hopefully describe what's actually happening as you look through this.

And one other thing that I do in the awake,

is I call this function show menu, and I pass a string main menu.

This is a function down below, so let's look at that really quickly.

Essentially, what this is doing is it's enabling or

disabling all of those game objects that make up these respective menus.

So you can see the first thing I do is, I set all of them to inactive.

And based on the strength that's passed in, I do a switch statement.

So if the case is main menu, I didn't turn on the main menu game object.

And I set the default button that should be selected for

keyboard input and controller input.

And then I set the title accordingly.

So the title is basically this UI text object, so

initially it's sSuper Sparty Brothers.

But for level select, it changes to level select.

And for the about screen, it changes to about.

[MUSIC]

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