Moving on from Unreal after my struggles with that program, I then downloaded Unity and searched around YouTube for an array of tutorials for me to hopefully follow along with and get something working.
This video above is the first tutorial I attempted to follow since it was quite a recent video created by a well-known professional indie developer, Thomas Brush.
This tutorial also provided a download for a "games kit", which would provide the basic framework coding-wise for a 2D platformer. This was ideal for me, as I had no skill in coding whatsoever.
This game kit can be found here:
While downloading this kit, I realised both this person creating the tutorial and the kit was intended for an earlier version of Unity.
So I went back to Unity to download this version- however this also created another roadblock for me in development because, for a reason I could not figure out, the download failed every single time I attempted to get it.
Because of this issue, I went back to the newest version with the hope that the versions and searched the internet for more recent tutorials. Which landed me on this video:
At the beginning of this tutorial, it first assists me in setting up the right folders and such within the engine. This organisation can greatly help later on during development, as it's easy to find everything you need.
Just as an example, this was me figuring out how to import assets into a folder in Unity:
Beyond that, I did not learn much else from this video, as once again they seemed to be using an earlier version of Unity then myself.
So once again, I went back to researching. I watched many different videos, google searched, etc trying to build up my confidence with the basics. Here you can see me following a video in a pop-out while also looking at Unity and exploring the basic features:
After doing my research for quite a while, I grew confident enough in my knowledge to start actual development instead of just exploring the engine.
I first started by creating a new empty object, naming it after my main character, and then bringing in the idle sprite of this character. Due to the size I had drawn him, he was much larger than the screen camera, so I also had to scale him down significantly.
After this, I also attempted to repeat a similar process but bring in the background ready for later animation to give the illusion of movement. I had drawn the background and some spare assets with the feature in mind that most backgrounds repeat or 'tile' themselves so minimal assets are used for creating a moving background.
So I could, later on, give this background a parallax effect, I created this game object as a 3D plane despite it being a 2D game.
At this point in the development, I was once again following tutorials online. And this is where I ran into another problem. Every tutorial I could find included drag-and-drop features for moving around files and placing them within the right components.
For some reason, my computer was incapable of dragging and dropping files in any program. For a while I messed around with the options and settings of Unity, attempting to find an alternative to upload files to the right areas without drag-and-drop capabilities, but I found nothing. And so I then searched the internet for hours for a solution to this problem. While it seemed to be quite a common issue for many people on Windows PCs, no fix I could find around the internet would resolve it for my computer.
So once again, my development process was halted by issues I could not fix, and all my current ideas went out the window (and the temptation to throw my PC out alongside them was strong).
At this current point in time, my project is left with a plane ready that I can not add anything to due to my computer system lacking one key feature.
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