Certification Prep Course Complete! - Game Dev Weekly

Salutations dear reader!
This was a pretty good week as I finished up the certification preparation course, marking the point at which I'm about 60% through with my Unity training in prep for starting my own projects. If things continue at this rate I'm hoping to finish the educational road-map by the end of December. For now though, lets talk about a few high points of the week.

One fun discovery this week is just how easy it is to get Unity's various services up and running. Here you can see the result of implementing Rewarded Video Ads. With just a few method calls and setting up an ID on the website, I was able to start serving ads on Android and rewarding myself with currency for doing so! Seriously it took me longer to figure out how to record my phone's screen than it did to set these things up.

Here is one that is practical for just about any project, the audio mixer. Up until now I've been managing sound levels by manually adjusting the volume on each Audio Source component until it sounded a bit right, but turns out that is the hard way. The actual way to do this is to group the various types of audio sources into audio groups and then control them from the mixer. This ensures things that should be adjusted together stay relative to each other.

I'd already been using NavMesh as it's pretty core to everything in the AI system, but it was nice to practice a few new details such as using NavMesh Obstacles to get avoidance around objects that are more dynamic. Pictured here the wall it slows around is marked as a dynamic obstacle and despite slowing down a bit around it the AI character still manages to get around it.

That's all for this week, now time to get back at it and make progress in the first part of the RPG combat mechanics course~