Lab 2 - Roll A Ball: Camera and Play Area

This assignment is due on Wednesday 4/11.

Continue off of Lab 1 for this assignment.

We will be following these video tutorials:

Part 1: Moving the Camera

First, we need to get the camera to follow the player.

Select the camera, move it up 10 units and tilt it down 45 degrees.
- Change the Y Position and the X Rotation.
Try making the Player the “parent” of the Main Camera.
- This is done by dragging the camera on top of the player in the Hierarchy View.
- Playtest the game. What happens?
We need a way to have the camera follow the player without also rotating.
This can’t be done with a simple “parent” operation, so let’s undo that.
Create a new script component on the Main Camera and call it CameraController
Add a public field player of type GameObject.
Add a private field offset of type Vector3.
In the Start() method, initialize offset to be the difference between the camera position and the player position.
- Our controller has a field transform that has a field position so we can get the camera position using transform.position.
- The player GameObject also has this transform field.
- What’s the difference between two vectors? Well, think about what we normally mean (mathematically) when we say “difference”
In Update(), set the position of the camera to be the player position plus the offset we calculated in Start()
Because this update depends on positions thats might be affected by physics update, we should use LateUpdate() instead - change the name of the method.

Let’s add some walls so that the player can’t fall off the edge.

Create a cube and set the scale to x = 0.5, y = 2, z = 20.5.
Name the cube WestWall
Slide the cube to the edge of the floor.
Create three additional cubes to serve as the four walls of our play area.
Use the Edit → Duplicate function to duplicate one of your walls - this will make the creation process faster.
The east and west walls face the same direction, but north and south are different.
- Either rotate, or swap the scale parameters, to create the north/south walls.
Playtest to confirm the player cannot fall off the map!