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Farm Defender
![](assets/farm_defender.gif)
I'm on the next to last section in GameDev.tv's Unity3D Developer course on Udemy. This section's project focused on making a Tower Defense game. I have never really played those much, but enjoyed making one and once I customized it to my liking, enjoyed playing it. I didn't invest the time into menus or finalizing the game loop because honestly I have no desire to make a Tower Defense game, but I can always go back and add that later if the mood strikes me. Check out the game here. Just click on open (brown) tiles, and if the tile you click isn't in the path, you can place a tower there. The towers shoot water at the egg bombs the evil chicken is hurling at the farm. It is your job to protect the farm! If you're interested in perusing the code, enjoy.
The most impoortant thing I learned in this section: how to implement breadth first search for path planning. I really think games are the way to teach folks this, it makes it so real. I know most of my games will probably use Unity's built in navmesh path planning which uses A*, but for what this game needed, BFS was perfect. The other cool nugget was how to build custom editor code. While building the world, it places a Text Mesh on top of the boxes, which was amazingly helpful for testing and troubleshooting the path planning. It also took care of the snapping, a much better experience than trying to remembver to use Unity's built in snap tool. Oh, one more thing, using a ring buffer to cycle the Towers, brilliant way of being efficient while letting the player move Towers around.
Voxel Art
I'm absolutely loving Voxel Art! While working on my Tower Defense project, I wasn't feeling the space theme they provided, so I started with some free assets in the Unity store, but after watching Rick's video on MagicaVoxel, I decided to create my own. Next update, I will share the full game, but for now, here's my first piece of Voxel art.
You can get MagicaVoxel here.
Calamari's Revenge
![](assets/calamari_preview.gif)
I'm really enjoying the Unity3D Developer course on Udemy. The third section really got things going with a rail shooter. Growing up with After Burner in the 80's, these games have nostalgia for me. Check out the game here. If you're interested in perusing the code, enjoy.
Things I learned in this section: terrain, bump, height, and normal maps, skybox, background music and audio tracks, animations & tmelines, singletons, cross-platform inputs, particles, triggers & collisions, sending messages, managing game objects in code, and last but not least UI.