Week Seven was a very busy week of development since at the end of the week on Saturday 18th March Southampton university Hosted a Science and engineering fair that me and my classmates attended and showcased our games in their current state. So during the week leading up to it, I spent a load of time making something playable for people to have some hands-on experience with “Kessler”. To start this week I wanted to create an outdoor scene the player could run around in and explore however I didn't at this stage believe I had the time to create all my assets to use to make a tile map system in unity so I went to the unity asset store and found a free asset pack called “Sunny land”

Screengrab of promo image of Sunny land asset pack located in the unity asset store

I attempted to use this pack to speed up the level creation for the event on Saturday 18th however, it had been a while since I used a tile map system in Unity so it took me a while to get to terms with how to use the feature again however, once I did the tiles from this pack were not appearing on a screen when I tried to add them to the scene, so after some googling and troubleshooting the issue I got nowhere and just decided to have a late night and spend the time creating my own tiles to make the intro bunker scene for my game.

Screengrab of Tile map Atlas for the bunker levels tiles created in Adobe Photoshop.

I started by using Photoshop to create 64px by 64px images that will when put into the tile map will come together to create a scene above you can see all the different tiles that go into making the Underground Bunker in which the player starts the game, the image below showcases what some of those tiles look like when they are put together as intended.

Screengrab of same tiles as in the image above but organized into the shapes they create when put together - done in Adobe Photoshop.

The first piece you see on the top right is the ground floor of the vault complete with a concrete slab flooring and dirt underneath that has bits of rock and other minerals in it and slowly goes into a darker clay-like texture, this piece is made up of six different tiles.

Separated tiles that are used to make up the concrete and dirt of the bunker - Created in Adobe Photoshop

The next rather large piece is the Vault door to the right of the previous piece, this was inspired by the vault doors seen in Bethesda's Fallout universe which can be seen through the groves of a lighter grey color to give the illusion of dimension without a two-dimensional space. This piece consists of nine different tiles.

Separated Tiles that are used to create the bunker/vault door - Created in Adobe Photoshop

and many more different pieces made up of a variety of different tiles one of my favorite pieces though is the light as I modeled this light after a Russian Bunker Light so that the light fits the theme of this being an underground bunker that was maybe made during the cold war.

The Light is in a light greenish color with a wired cage around the light bulb with a giant green section above that houses the lightbulb inside and the light electrical components you can see that with my light asset made out of four different tiles I tried to replicate this as accurately as I can by using a 64 by 64-pixel space.

Image of assembled and separated tiles that make up the Bunker light asset - Created in Adobe Photoshop

After, creating all the tiles needed for the foreground of the bunker I then took all of those images that I had complied into the TileATLAS seen above and made a mockup in Photoshop of what I wanted the bunker scene to look like.

Mockup scene created in Adobe Photoshop of what the Bunker level will look like using the tiles shown above.

I also added to this mockup some pencil sketches using the pen tool to be able to plan out all the background elements featured on each floor of the vault, from the bottom level being the sleeping quarters middle levels being the kitchen and rec areas and the top level being the vault entrance. After creating that mock-up I then took to Unity and added all these elements to the tile map I had created earlier when trying I discovered that the issue earlier was that the images for the tile map were not set to the correct pixels per unit which I then corrected with my designs. To have playability for Saturday I also had to this week add a character that the player controls however, since I haven't designed what I would like my player to look like just yet I had a look around for a quick free, and easy template character and found one called Prototype Hero and from that file I extracted the sprite sheet and used that to make a player character who also had animations.

Screengrab of Prototype Hero sprite sheet taken from the Prototype Hero Demo available in the Unity Asset store.

To get the character to move I had to use a character controller and after watching some YouTube videos I came across a channel called “Brackeys” that had a video on 2D game movement and in that they have a link to their GitHub which allowed me to downland a character controller that deals with all the complex movement calculations that I could just reference in my script.