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Project: City Runner

In the summer of 2024, I spent several weeks creating a few different small prototype games in Unity. My goal was simply to try to learn as much as I could about Unity by watching tutorials, reading documentation, and building small projects. The culmination of my wonderful journey down the rabbit hole was producing this City Runner prototype.

The starting point for this project was the Photon Quantum Kinematic Character Controller. I chose this because I wanted to tinker with something that had an awesome multiplayer experience. I was deeply fascinated reading about how Photon Quantum’s underlying deterministic engine made it so that all players were effectively locked in sync while playing. I was also impressed by how responsive the kinematic character controller felt. With that foundation in place, I began to add pieces from different Unity asset store packages and miscellaneous online sources. The player character and animations are from Mixamo. The city map is called SimplePoly City on the Unity asset store. I used Mesh Baker to add collision to the map. The music and ambient sound effects were from various free online sources.

The most impressive coding related piece of this project was creating the animation controller and then tying in various sound effects based on the player’s animation state. From aligning the running sound effect with the speed of the player’s leg movements, to adding the sound of air gusting passed the player as they fall from the sky, to making the transition between animations buttery-smooth by using linear interpolation (lerping). I had a blast making this all come to life!

If you’d like to try out a demo of my Runner prototype, please refer to the links below. Fair warning, the demo will lag if you don't have a graphics card. Please check out the video so you can see how it runs on good hardware. If you’re okay with downloading a file, the Windows version runs the best. Make sure you jump on a donut!

Demos:

- James