Western Shooter Devblog #9 | From Cubes to Polygons

Now as much as we love Cubert just the way he is, our game could use a bit of a makeover.

As I’m sure you know, that will take a little more than just a few minutes in Visual Studio! But lucky for us, with a little big of magic (and the Unity Asset Store) we can get a nice looking scene in no time at all!

Using Synty Studio’s Western Low-Poly Art, I was able to perfectly recreate my original layout with real western style assets!

And look at Cubert now! He’s got himself some fully-functional T-posing arms! We’re all very proud of him.

However, we can’t just put in these assets and call it a day, we need to get our game working again in this new scene and create new prefabs with our new models!

We needed to rework some of our numbers in our code like setting our boundaries in this new scene. But other than that, making new prefabs was a breeze and although everyone is T-posing right now, I think it would be safe to say that our game got a definite makeover!

But it’s important to point out the importance of prototyping without assets, before we get carried away with our games new look! For one, being able to focus solely on just the mechanics and programming of your game is vital for saving time. When you are creating your foundation for your game’s base functions, there will be constant changes, reworking, and erasing of code. So when you spend a bunch of that time applying your code to an actual asset you would use for the final game, where you are assigning animations, changing the layout of your scene, or actually changing an asset itself to work with your code. Once you find out that your program isn’t actually fun, or don’t want it for your game anymore, you’ve just wasted all that time optimizing your assets for code you aren’t gonna use anymore. Starting from scratch is common in the beginning, so save yourself the time and just use primitives to prototype your game. Besides, it’s important in the early stages to know that if your game is fun, even with primitive blocks and spheres as your game assets, then your game will be even more fun when you apply your real assets.

Don’t polish a turd!

In the next devblog, we are gonna give our game a little more life by adding animations!