After four days without food, water, sleep, or seeing another living soul, you're finally nearing your mission's end. It has been a grueling challenge of survival. Your body is shaking constantly. Your vision is blurred. Your eyes hurt and your head pounds. Your tongue sticks to the roof of your mouth. Ahead, you can see a clearing. Something inside you makes you certain this is what you have been searching for. You emerge from the undergrowth and stumble towards the ramshackle building at the center of the clearing, prise the doors open and look inside towards your prize, the end of your bitter struggle, when...
"Honey, we're home. Where are you?"
There are footsteps on the stairs and your bedroom door flies open.
"It looks like you haven't moved from your bedroom for days! Have you been playing that game again?"
In this chapter, you will be setting up the final objective. It's up to you what it is, but make it good. Your game players will want something worth staying up all night for. Or all week. You have to compete with food, sleep, and friends.
When you craft the climax to your game level only you can decide what it will be. It takes imagination and skill, and these are two things this book can only introduce you to! Crafting levels, designing exciting areas to explore, dreaming up artifacts to find, and puzzles to solve is what you will be doing from now on after you graduate from this Beginner's Guide. It's almost time to let you out into the wide, wild world of game asset and level design.
Before we part company, there's a couple of things we can still do together. First, there's the wrapping to the present that lies within the clearing. The building within which you will place your final goal. Your goal can be a spaceship that the hero flies away in, or one that contains a toxic alien. It can be a bunch of criminals sat around a card table that you have to take out one by one. It can be a rare artifact you have to escape with using stealth tactics. Anything! It's all up to you—now that you have the skills to accomplish it.
In this chapter, you will practice:
- Texturing a building from photo materials
- Creating a lifelike building from scratch
- Arranging all your assets into your completed game level in Unity
- Setting up ambient lighting, sky and fog.
- Adding a realistic city skyline as a distant backdrop
- Creating an executable file or web page for your completed game level
What you will have at the end of this chapter is a file that you can burn to disc, e-mail around, or upload to the Web. A real 3D game anyone can play. That's the prize for you at the end of my game level.
