Assignment 8: “Helicopter Game 3D, The Gem Update”

Objectives

Getting Started

Download the distro code for your first game from https://cdn.cs50.net/games/2019/x/assignments/8/assignment8.zip and unzip assignment8.zip, which should yield a directory called assignment8.

Then, in a terminal window (located in /Applications/Utilities on Mac or by typing cmd in the Windows task bar), move to the directory where you extracted assignment8 (recall that the cd command can change your current directory), and run

cd assignment8

Downloading Blender

First, in order to be able to import some models into our scene appropriately (and to hopefully give you a taste of what 3D modeling is all about, should you be interested), head here to download the latest version of Blender, a free and open-source 3D modeling toolkit that rivals most commercial equivalents. Using and mastering Blender is in and of itself a tremendous skill and art form and not required of this class, but do experiment if you feel so inclined! You can find some fantastic learning resources here and here! Should you wish to tinker with the models used in this project, you can find the helicopter, skyscrapers, and airplane (which I so crudely modeled) in the Assets/Resources/Models folder of the Unity project you’ve downloaded!

Downloading Unity

You will of course need to download Unity before you can run the distro code and see your project, so do just follow the link here to download Unity’s open beta. The setup is very straightforward, but you will need a Unity ID in order to use the software (which is free!), so do visit this link to create one; you should also be prompted to create a new Unity ID via the software’s launcher once it’s downloaded onto your computer.

Once you’ve downloaded and logged in to Unity, just click the “Open” button on the launcher and browse to the folder of the cloned code from the distro, and the project will open up!

But wait… nothing seems to load into the scene once you’ve opened it! With the project open in Unity, navigate to Assets/Resources/Scenes, and then select Main in the file browser at the bottom of the screen, double-clicking to open, and all should be loaded into the scene view!

Note: If you find that some of the models in your scene are not showing up, it’s likely because you either don’t have Blender installed yet (see instructions above), or you opened the project prior to the Blender installation. If you already have Blender installed and still don’t see anything, do just right-click, in the Unity editor, any of the models located in Assets/Resources/Models and select the Reimport All option, which should fix missing models after a few moments of loading!

Next-Level

Welcome to your eighth assignment! Unity is a lot to take in at once, but beneath all of the details, we’ll find that this set of tools will allow us to be our most flexible and productive yet, even when coding in C#! As such, this assignment is meant less to be intensive and more just to get a grasp on navigating Unity and understanding how things work.

Your goal this assignment:

How to Submit

  1. If you haven’t already, install Git and, optionally, install submit50.
  2. Using Git, push your work to https://github.com/me50/USERNAME.git, where USERNAME is your GitHub username, on a branch called games50/assignments/2019/x/8 or, if you’ve installed submit50, execute

    submit50 games50/assignments/2019/x/8
    

    instead.

  3. Record a 1- to 5-minute screencast in which you demonstrate your app’s functionality and/or walk viewers through your code. Upload that video to YouTube (as unlisted or public, but not private) or somewhere else.
  4. Submit this form.