Seven Skies – map generation demo

You enter the tavern with nothing but a small sachet of gold and a taste for adventure.

There is word of mysterious towers hidden within the clouds of the Seven Skies. The merchants here would pay a fine price for treasures from the Old World. You know your trusty old ship can take you there, if only you could arrange a few upgrades.

Play on itch.io

The result of the two–week rapid ideation sprint.

In a total of 36 hours, I have created my first Unity build, having little prior knowledge of either Unity or C#. This included writing a simple Java prototype and porting most of the code to C#.

Features that made the list:

• Dynamic map generation (shown in demo above)

Features that didn’t make the list:

• Sailing through maps (in progress as of close of sprint; raycasting for tile selection implemented)
• User interface
• Tavern gameplay – buying maps, ship repair
• Trading loot for upgrades
• Flavour text and narrative

Despite the long list of unimplemented functionality, I am generally happy with the result, as it helped me pursue two of my goals: learning Unity and managing my time.

The graph on the left represents the various tasks undertaken during the sprint, chronologically from top to bottom.

Much of my time was spent with C# programming and the Unity game engine.

I have stumbled upon many issues that had to do with class and variable scoping, syntax, the positioning of objects on the scene, and the interaction of my scripts with Unity objects.

I was able to overcome most challenges by scouring forums. Here are a few of my Google searches over the past few days:

unity automatically remove unused assets
unity draw filled rectangle on gui
unity timeline call script
unity awake vs start
how to get the script component in unity
unity pass arguments to prefab before instantiating
unity use arraylist in inspector

I was ultimately defeated by a Null reference when attempting to place the ship on the map’s spawn point while implementing the Sailing mechanics. I also had trouble setting up the debugger in Visual Studio for OS X, which might have helped me investigate issues faster.