@JPR

FINAL DEVLOG!!
README is now complete, and the final app is now on itch.io!! So glad to see something I’ve made now all done!

Just finished Main Menu and Minigame Setup Menus

• Now Main menu has the operational carousel
• Pressing on the icons to enter and using keyboard inputs prevent softlocks from the Arduino not being connected yet
• Minigame Scenes no longer have UI as part of it, but as part of a seperate Scene, so those scenes are active on awake
• Full gameplay loop is done, with score incremementing, short winner messages and returning to Main menu being able to navigate all Scenes

Finally finished the Startup Menu and half of Main Menu
Since I worked on both of these simultaneously, I’ll keeo this devlog mainley about the Startup Menu, then leave the details about Main Menu when I finished. Now,

• There’s a starting animation, using the Timeline feature, and then slides of info to get started.
• The carousel feature I learnt by a tutorial by Rehope Games on YT
• Drew my own Icons to get the notebook type aesthetic im trying to go for i guess? the font stuff just didnt work out so I skipped that, used default font
• Now at the end, you can test if its working and input the port to read from, instead of doing it in the Main Menu
• You can copy and paste the code to put into the IDE on one of the slides, solves that logical error
• Adds more info overall, my main goal of gamifying learning right?

Next steps:
Finish Main Menu
Make seperate scenes for the setup for each minigame, instead of a UI Overlay at the start (too much issues)
Check everything runs fine
Write ReadMe
Upload to itch.io

Optional steps:
Sound?
Particles to the games?
Maybe for a future event..

Ready for launch!

Since it is the Beta version, I fully commented the code so I could pick up on it another time without forgetting. To release the beta, I put it up on itch.io to download, as well as updated the README on GitHub so that all the non-mentioned setup could be explained to anyone wanting to give it a go! Also made a bit of banner art and icon art, a style i will pick up again to try to integrate into the game itself. Hopefully I will find the time to dedicate myself to this once again, and thank you Stardance!

Game fully working!
The full game is done with the Main Menu, Minigame 1 and Minigame 2.

I added small new things
Minigame 1:

• Tutorial Page at the start fully works, including displaying the layout of the breadboard and the testing part works too. Here, the P1ZPos variable (the variable that stores the reading of the potentiometers and turns the range of 0->1023 into -6->6) has maths done on it to fit it onto the range of the screen. Each potentiometer controls a car icon, and the car has to be on the very right (aka potentiometer to the max), on top of it’s green silhouette. Both cars need to remain there for 5s for game to start.
  Minigame 2:
• camera elevates each block so it doesn’t go off screen
• also tutorial page now works with the test, where both players have to hold onto their button for 5 seconds before starting. there was an issue i had to fix for these buttons, figuring out a way to only send one reading when the player holds it down to click once, because readings are sent really frequently, a hold for less than a second led to 20 occasions of button being held down, so I added another variable, buttonPressedOnce, did some logic operations with buttonHeld (the readings) to make sure the signal is sent once. (side note, I know realise I should have done devlogs more frequently because i could’ve gone into more detail explaining the things I’ve learnt, but alas, I tried to explain as much as I could in my actual code, for anyone checking it out)

Here’s the new major stuff!
The Main Menu came with a lot of challenges. The idea was for the user to use a potentiometer and a button to scroll between games and select. Issue was, multiple instances of Arduino Connector happened, with scenes being reloaded and led to all kinds of chaos. So I had to do some Instancing, removed Arduino Connector from Minigame Scenes. I also had to add a score manager, that also would be permanent and instanced, so variables could stay the whole time the game was run. Also, to connect the winners of the minigame to the score manager, I had to include win conditions to each of the minigame game handler scripts. Then the Score manager would read from the public variable “winner” in those Game Handler scripts, to see who won and increment the respective score.

Then, I realised a small flaw. The Arduino Connector script was static to the usual port that I used on my computer, but a different user would be using a different port. So, I added a textbox and a porthandler to recieve info from that textbox into a public variable for the Arduino Connector script to retrieve and refresh the port entered, to ensure connection still works if changed.

That was it, the game functions perfectly fine, however there is one major thing I have to do before shipping. I had to showcase this prototype of a game to a summer program I was doing, and realised that when I was showcasing, everything was already setup for people to use. But I was only able to setup the game since I knew the way. I never showed a setup schematic in the main menu, nor did I even give the user the Arduino IDE code to send to their board. These crucial extra details I will do in future devlogs, but so far, that was my game!

Core concept added + Almost done with Minigame 1 + Minigame 2!
PS: Devlog is long because I forgot to post a previous one…

To start the proof-of-concept I had to figure out how I could get the Arduino Uno to connect to Unity. Learning from a tutorial by DIY TechRush, I found out the main method was by having code sent to the board from the IDE where readings are sent to the Serial Port.

After I understood that, I could finally start on my first idea, a Timeline-based race through a city between two cars that have to avoid obstacles. Since I’m working on a time crunch, I used some free low poly models:

• cars by ‘antonmoek’
• city by ‘ilkhom23’
  Their models are so cool - go check them out!

Once I added the models, I changed potentiometer readings from rotation to transformation on the Z axis, so the car could go left and right to avoid things.
Since I was using two potentiometers (for two players), before printing, I had to concatenate “1:” or “2:” for the Unity script to find out which is which. I also encountered some delay issues, which I fixed by increasing baud rate from 9600 to 115200 and adding a delay function in the boards code.

Then, it was time to make a rig for the players and their cameras (cameras made two split screens). The rig was so that I could animate the position of the player using the Timeline feature.
Then, on the same timeline, add animation tracks for the ‘enemies’ (just buses and vans). Added some variety, some were static some were driving to the player, some fell out the sky from no where. Also, to make it clear they were enemies, I added some outline shading to them from this tutorial by ‘AAvirusAA’.
Then, I added box colliders and rigidbodies to the player cars and the enemies while tagging them as ‘player’ and ‘enemy’ respectively. Each time there was a hit, it would increment a counter for each player. Then used the canvas/UI feature to display the counter!

Finally, I got started on the tutorial at the start. I wanted to show the player(s) a TinkerCad setup including what they need and what pins to connect. Then, (kind of inspired by those switch games where they joycons are taken off, and before the game starts a button must be pressed to ensure connectivity), created an image to show the setup before the game, and to only disappear once the test has passed!

Got bored of M1 so started on M2

The concept for this was to do that simple mobile game where the blocks slide and you have to stack them by pressing it. The foundation of the game was from a tutorial by Jason Weimann, and I added the following things:

• Instead of “Fire1” from the Input Package, it was connected to a boolean variable that was based off of the Serial Readings of whether a button was pressed. Only Player 1 button could affect player 1 turn, etc.
• Alternating colours of blue and purple to match the cars
• Game over screen
• Tutorial/setup at start

Thanks for reading this far! If anyone has any suggestions on improvements please let me know!