Alright, let me tell you about my little adventure with “blue fox run.” It’s not as glamorous as it sounds, but hey, every project has its story, right?
So, it all kicked off when I decided I needed a new side project. I was itching to try something different, and I stumbled upon this tutorial about creating a simple game. “blue fox run” wasn’t the original name, more like a working title that kinda stuck. Don’t even ask me why blue fox, it just sounded catchy at the time.
First thing’s first, I had to dust off my rusty coding skills. I hadn’t really touched game development in ages. I decided to go with Unity, since I’d messed around with it before. Downloaded the latest version, fired it up, and… stared blankly at the screen for a good 15 minutes. Where do I even begin?
I started by blocking out the basic level. Just some simple cubes for the ground, a slightly taller one for a jump-able platform, you know, the usual. Felt pretty basic, but you gotta start somewhere. Then came the main character. Found a free fox asset online – no time to be modeling my own creatures right now. Dragged it into the scene, added a rigid body and a collider, and bam! We got a fox.
Next hurdle: making the fox move. This took way longer than I expected. I was wrestling with the input system, trying to get the fox to respond properly to keyboard controls. It was either moving too fast, too slow, or not at all. After a lot of tweaking and googling (Stack Overflow became my new best friend), I finally got something that felt decent. The fox could run and jump, albeit a bit clunkily.
Then I wanted to add some enemies. Simple AI stuff, just moving back and forth on a platform. Found some free goblin assets, slapped some basic movement scripts on them, and now the fox had something to avoid. Of course, the collision detection was wonky at first. The fox would clip through the goblins, or sometimes just explode on contact. More debugging, more Googling. Eventually, I got it to a point where the fox would respawn after touching a goblin.
To spice things up, I added some coins to collect. Another free asset, another simple script. When the fox touches a coin, the coin disappears and the score goes up. Pretty standard stuff, but it added a nice sense of progression.
The UI was a pain. Getting the score to display correctly, adding a game over screen, all that stuff felt tedious. But it’s crucial for making the game feel complete. I messed around with Unity’s UI system, watched a few tutorials, and eventually got something that worked.
The final touch was some background music and sound effects. Again, found some free assets online. Added a simple looping track for the background, and some jump and collect sound effects. It made a huge difference in the overall feel of the game.
I spent a weekend just polishing things up – fixing bugs, tweaking the level design, and generally making it feel a bit smoother. It’s not perfect by any means, but I learned a ton. It was a fun little project, and now I’ve got a slightly clunky, but playable, “blue fox run.” Maybe I’ll revisit it someday and make it even better.
Lessons learned? Game development is hard work, even for simple projects. But it’s also incredibly rewarding. Plus, I got to play with a blue fox, so that’s a win in my book.
