Mission One – Find the Facts - Creating E-Learning Games with Unity - page 61

Chapter 3. Mission One - Find the Facts
Recall that in the first two chapters, we developed the core technology for a camera,
player controls, interactive objects, and a mission-tracking system. Now it's time to
apply our technology and make our first learning objective. Our e-learning game will
educate the user on the 50 American states, the state flags, and some state trivia. In
this chapter, we will assemble the systems we have created thus far and develop our
first playable game level—the first of three in our final game.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
• Introducing mission one: find the facts
• Designing games to maximize fun
• Implementing the core classes for mission one
• Playing the level
Finding the facts
In this game, the hero (player) plays the park ranger in charge of cleaning up Confed-
eration National Park. In mission one, the park ranger has to find the missing flags for
the flag monument and return them to their holders. The user will have to find five of
50 US flags. They will be placed at random locations in the world. The user will have
to collect them, read about the associated states' trivia, and then bring the flags back
once all the five flags have been found. The game comprises the following compon-
ents:
• FlagLocators : This GameObject hierarchy contains a set of potential flag
locations. From these 10 potential locations, five will be randomly chosen.
• Terrain : We introduce the terrain editor in this chapter and create a terrain
mesh to replace the ground plane from Chapter 2 , Interactive Objects and
MissionMgr . As our design requires us to have a park-like setting for our
game, the terrain editor is the best candidate for building this in the editor
quickly and easily; the alternative is modelling the park in a 3D modelling pro-
gram such as Maya and then exporting and importing into Unity. By adding
grass, mountains, and trees we create a picturesque park that will serve as
the backdrop and scene for our first game environment.