Set up an FPS Controller Character in Unity

You can access our newest full course on creating an FPS game here: Construct a First Person Shooter

Table of contents

Part 1

We will begin by creating a new Unity project and naming it “FPSShooter.” Save the project in a location on your hard drive where you keep your development files. Make sure 3D mode is enabled and click on the Create Project button:

Select the Assets>Import Package>Characters.

A new menu will open and you will see several folders with lots of assets in them.

Make sure all the boxes are checked and then click on the Import button in the bottom right hand corner of the menu:

Once the assets have been imported navigate to the Assets>Standard Assets>Characters>FirstPersonCharacter folder and open it.

Right click in the Hierarchy and create a cube. Rename the cube to “Floor.” Reposition the Floor to the 0,0,0 position. Change the Scale value to be 20 on the X, 0.1 on the Y, and 20 on the Z.

Create a new folder and name it “Project.”

Open the Project folder and inside this folder create another folder and name this folder “Materials.”

Inside the Materials folder we are going to create a new material, rename this new material to “Floor.” We are going to use this material to shade the floor a darker color.

With the Floor material selected look at the Inspector window and click on the color picker to choose a new color for the floor:

In order to apply the Floor material to the Floor in the Scene we just drag it and drop it onto the Floor object in the Scene:

Now drag and drop the FPSController prefab into the Scene:

Because the FPSController came bundled with a camera we need to delete the Main camera from our Scene.

Now if you hit the Play button in the Unity editor you will be able to move around on the floor:

Part 2

Select the FPSController in the Hierarchy and take a look at the Inspector and find the First Person Controller script.

There are a lot of options here on this script component that can be adjusted.

You can adjust the Walk Speed to the value of 10, and this will make the player walk very fast.

There is also a Jump Speed value that can be changed, if you changed this value to 20 you can jump much higher than you were able to before.

If the Gravity Multiplier value was changed to 10, this would make the gravity stronger, and the character will barely leave the ground when they jump.

All of these values on the First Person Character script can be adjusted and experimented with in order to get the Player character working the way you want it to in your games.

Transcript Part 1

Hello, everyone. This is Glauco Pires, for Mammoth Interactive, and welcome to the First Person Shooter tutorial in Unity.

So to begin, we have to open the Unity software and click on this button to make a new project. And in this screen here we have to set a project name which is simply going to be FPS Shooter, or just Shooter, whatever you think is better for you. And, we also have to set the project location. So, I like to use a project folder that is right under my home folder, just to keep things organized. It’s not a good idea to leave things and documents under the desktop folder, because it’s going to mix up with other things. Okay, and once we do this we have to make sure that we have 3D enabled, just make sure you’re not going to make a 2D project. So we’re going to mark this one, and we’re now going to click on create project.

So we have to wait just a little bit for Unity to set up all the files for us for the beginning scripts and well, all of the procedures to open, and we’re going to be in this screen here.

Okay, so we want to make a first person shooter game, and there is one important thing to do. Unity is very friendly regarding using asset packages. So, some people from around the world, they use the asset store for Unity, and they build things that you can’t simply purchase or download for free depending on what’s available out there. And you can already use these things in your projects. So, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Some things are already done so we can worry about making the game and not, uh well, reinventing the wheel.

So, for the first person shooter game there is a lot of work already done for us and already packaged with Unity. So if you installed your Unity software and you didn’t change anything regarding the standard assets, they should already be here in your project. And to include everything related to first person shooters, we’re going to the assets option here, we’re going to go to import package, and you’re going to see that there are several options available here.

There is custom package in the case you download it from the internet and you want to add anything to your project. But it also has other things here, like 2D, cameras, characters, effects, particle systems, vehicles, there are lots of things available here. But the one that we want is characters. So we’re going to select this option here, a new menu is going to open, and we’re going to see this window here that says import Unity package. This is where the magic is going to happen.

So, if you collapse a few of these folders here, you’re going to see several different things. So there are characters, cross platform input, editor. So all of these folders, they do all the necessary work to make first person shooter character’s work in a very simple way. So if you go to the character’s folder you’re going to see that we already have this first person character. And we even have two more options, rollerball and third person character.

But, lets get first person character, okay. And we have audio, we have prefabs, we have scripts, so everything’s already built for us. What we want to do now is, let’s make sure all of the check boxes are marked. You can just click on this one if you enabled or disabled anything, so make sure everything is going to be selected. And we now press import. So that package is going to basically decompress, and all of its files are going to be added to our project which is basically this assets folder.

Okay, we have to wait just a little bit, some images are going to be a process, they’re going to be compressed depending on the build settings that you adjusted for your project, but well, we just have to wait a little bit. And after this is done, you’re going to see that with a simple drag and drop, we’re going to be able to enable the first person shooter mode, okay. So, just a few more assets in, there we go.

So, in the assets folder we now have this standard assets folder and here we have characters. Let’s enter this folder. Okay, just click here. And in the characters folder we have first person character, we open that. And now we have audio, we have a text file that says some guidelines here that you can read here if you want, and we have prefabs and we have scripts. So if you take a look at the guideline, the first option, the first entry that they say in these instructions is, there should be a flat ground to walk around on. Because if you add the player in an empty scene, that player is basically going to fall.

So we’re going to come here into hierarchy, we right click, select 3D object, and we can add two things. Either a cube, or terrain, okay. Or, we could also use a plane as well. I’m going to start with a cube, okay even though the plane works just fine. We want to keep things simple and well, we’re just going to adjust this in a better way by using cubes. So I’m going to select this cube here, and we have a new entry in the hierarchy. I’m now going to re-name that so right click, choose Rename, and we can name this as Floor, something very simple.

And we have this cube here. In the inspector, we want to make sure its position is going to be in the center. Zero, zero, zero. And the scale on X, let’s make it bigger, like 20. Y is going to be smaller than that, so lets use 0.1. So it’s going to look like that, a really flat floor. And Z is going to be 20 as well. So we have that little sheet where we can basically walk on.

Okay, it’s going to be something very simple for us. And now that we have that floor here, we should just change its color a little bit to make it easier to see where we are going to walk on. So, we can go to the assets folder, right here. We can right click, choose create, and then folder, and here we’re going to name this folder as project.

So, why do I do this? I do this because in the root folder for your project, which means the Assets folder, you might include different asset packages and each of these packages are going to make a folder here. So we have standard assets, and maybe want to add a multiplier later, maybe you download an asset pack for a toonish level, and there’s going to be another folder. So there should be several different folders for every different asset that you make. So a good idea is to make a project folder because we’re going to ensure that everything is going to be in this folder is created by us. It’s not going to mix up with other folders. In your first projects it might not be necessary, but even though I just said that, it is important for you to organize things from the beginning.

Okay, it’s going to make a lot of difference once you evolve your project to something bigger. So here in this project folder, we now right-click, choose create, we’re going to make another folder, and we’re going to name this materials. And now inside this folder we’re going to make a material, which is basically the element that is going to shade this floor in a different way. So right click, create, then material, and I’m going to rename this as floor. Simple as that. And with that here, we’re going to change its color.

Okay, you can just select the floor and look at the inspector, so its information is loaded here. We’re going to click in this large rectangle and use the color picker to choose anything we want. I’m going to choose a dark orange, okay like that. Or maybe a dark gray, should be okay as well. So I’m going to click here, choose that, and to apply this material to this floor we can simply drag it and drop here. Okay, so we have a dark floor.

Alright, now, if you go back to the first person character and look at the second instructions, it’s going to say place the first person character prefab in the scene. So this is the magic that is going to happen. If you go to the prefabs folder, you’re going to see two prefabs. FPSController and RigidBodyFPS controller. So, if you get an FPS controller, and you drag and you drop in the hierarchy, you’re going to see this element here, okay. So lets use the transform tool to move it up a little bit. And click on this arrow and move it up to this position.

And you’re going to notice a few things. Okay, so that character contains a little audio icon and contains that camera here. Okay, so that means the character, the FPS controller, contains its own camera. And that makes sense because we are going to be looking through the perspective of a character, of a humanoid, or through a monster for example. It’s simply going to be here, and we’re going to see things like they see. That means we don’t need two cameras.

Okay if you look at the instructions, the 3rd instruction is going to say, if present, delete the main camera that exists in the new scenes by default. Okay, so if you look here, we already have a main camera in this scene. We have main camera, we have directional light, floor, and FPS controller. So, we’re going to delete this camera. No longer necessary. And now we have this FPS controller here. Okay, so at this point of this project, if we press the play button, we have to wait a little bit because this is the first time this game is going to be played.

But, once you are here, I can hear the footsteps of the player. You can’t hear them right now because of my recording. But well, if you walk, the footsteps are playing. If you press pace, you jump, and there is even a jumping sound, which is very good. If you don’t want to hear the sounds you can just press mute audio here, in the game window, and its going to be better for us to walk around the scene.

So, just with little adjustments we can already have a player here. We can even run if you hold shift, you can walk really fast in this game. And we can pretty much start working on the first person shooter.

Transcript Part 2

Whenever you are making games, it is important to understand that things need to be highly customizable. Analyze that. You may write a lot of code for making a character to move, for it to jump, for it to shoot but at certain points, you have to be very quick about how you change things because making games is a thing that requires a lot of creativity and a lot of experimentation.

So, while the game is running, you need to be able to adjust variables, to adjust the settings for the player and for the enemies for the entire game and then adjust that and for example, you might have a team where you have a game designer like you have a fellow artist, programmer, sound designers, and they might want to change some settings, so a good thing about Unity is that it can easily make things customizable and we’re going to learn how to do this in the next lessons.

The first thing that we want to check is to select the FPSController in the Hierarchy and look at the Inspector. So, we have several components here like transform character controller but the important one as we want to check is the first person controller script. You’re going to see there are lots of fields here, we have check boxes, we have text fields, we have some knobs that we can drag and change that here, jump speed, gravity, multiplier, so there are lots of things here that we can use and that we customize.

So for example, if you press the play button right now, you are now running the game. What you can do is you can change these variables to experiment, to try new things, so maybe the walking speed for your game might be too quick and you can change that from five to three and run speed shouldn’t be 10, maybe six, you can just get here, change these numbers and if you walk now, you’re going to walk slower than before. If walk speed was set to 10 for example, then the player would walk really, really fast, you can see that it’s moving up and down very quickly because well, it’s moving very quickly.

So, let me go back here to five and 10. You shouldn’t use this as walking setting right now. It’s basically when you hold shift, then that checkbox disappears. That’s something that is dynamic. You don’t need to change that and we also have other settings.

Let’s see some of the most important ones. We have walk speed, run speed, we have the run speed lengthen, that’s okay, and we also have the jump speed. That is, for example, if you choose 20 here and you jump, you’re going to jump much higher than before, so that could be thought as the impact of your jump, of your legs, how strong you’re going to perform a jump and we have the gravity multiplier.

This one is pretty interesting. If we choose 10 here and we jump, we barely leave the floor because the gravity’s going to be very strong but if we change it to one, for example, and we press space, it’s going to feel like we are in the main. So, why do we have this gravity multiplier? It’s basically part of these variables were set here. The default variables for the gravity, so you might want to check this, if you go to Edit, Project Settings and then you go to Physics, we’re going to see that the gravity sets in minus 9.81, so that’s the real value for the gravity that actually happens in the real world but when you’re playing the game, sometimes you don’t want realism to be all over it because that is going to make your game not entirely fun.

So, for example, if we were to jump like this, with the gravity multiplier one, it wouldn’t be very good except if we were on the moon or on another planet, so maybe if you’re making a space game that would be interesting but if we use gravity multiplier as one, then we would have to reduce the jump speed, so if you jump, it’s going to look like this.

However, you see, we still have a lot of air time by doing this jump. We jump and then we return quickly to the floor but that’s not realistic at all, that’s very small, very slow movement, so that’s why we have to play with two things, the jump speed and gravity multiplier and the value that we have here for jumping is is pretty much default on every, every, every first person shooter game you play, either it’s in a mobile phone, it’s in a video game, it pretty much feels like that almost every time, so that’s why we have this gravity multiplier.

Now, if you go to mouse look, there going to be a few settings here, so the most basic of them is the sensitivity. If you played old first person shooters, you might remember that you can set these things in the console. Right now it’s set to two on X and Y and we’re moving like this. I’m moving my mouse around, looking to the left and to the right. If I change that to five on both of them, then it’s going to be much more sensitive. I’m moving the mouse in a very short length and we are turning our heads very quickly here. So, that’s something that you might even want to allow your players to change later in the settings screen but I’m gonna leave it at two.

Now, we also have here clamp vertical rotation. This one is very interesting. So, if you’re playing a first person shooter game it is very usual for you to be able to look down all the way and to look up all the way as well. If you are making a first person shooter game where you are a turret or if you are in a weapon you might want to change this setting, so you ensure that this is checked and you might define the minimum X and the maximum X. This is the rotation. It’s how low or how high we can look.

So, if we change that to minus 20 and 20 for example, if I look up, there is a vertical limit, so right now I’m moving my mouse upwards but we can’t look up all the way. If I move the mouse down, same thing applies, I can’t look directly, well, 90 degrees down, I can look to the floor but there is that limit here. That’s interesting if you are holding a turret.

And also one other interesting thing is we have this move setting. If you mark this checkbox, and you look around, so if you move your mouse, then Unity is going to ensure that that movement, that look movement is going to be very smooth. It’s going to slowly change from one target, from the one place you’re looking before, to the place you’re looking, so again this is interesting for turrets. As turrets might be very strong weapons, you might use low values for the smooth time, so it takes time for you to aim at an enemy that’s coming at you. On the other hand, if you aim correctly and you shoot, you’re going to destroy that enemy very quickly.

So, let me just restart the scene to reset these settings and that’s important. If you are in the play mode and you change these settings and you stop the game from running right now, all of the settings are going to be reset to how they were before you pressed the play button in Unity, so what you want to do is you want to tune your things, tune these values here, tune all of these fields and right now the numbers that you think are going to work well. So, you stop the scene, then set them and move forward.

And another one that’s interesting to see is the head bob. By default in Unity that head bob is set as active, so if you look, you’re going to have that movement as you are walking or as you are running. It’s the natural movement of your head. It moves up and down vertically but for some players that might induce some nausea at some players, so we might want to disable that feature completely, so you can just click on this checkbox and if you walk there is no head bob at all, that’s common.

However, if you want to use the head bob, you can change its settings here. There is the horizontal, the vertical range and well, some other settings here that we might want to change. And the same applies for the jump bob. If you jump and you land you notice that there is a little vibration. If you change this bob amount to one for example, you can see that more clearly, so if you land, there is that little kick back when you land, it’s like you’re landing on your feet and your knees they bend a little bit for you to land safely. It’s something very natural.

Well, I’m showing you that just to give you the idea that it can change and that you can customize things. And once you make your scripts which we’re going to do very shortly, we want to make sure it’s highly customizable like this one here, so we can change things very, very quickly and I’m going to leave the default values here because they work very well for me. I think they are all basically okay but feel free to pause this video right now to stop the course a little bit and change to the values that you think are going to be comfortable for you.

Interested in continuing? Check out our newest full Construct a First Person Shooter course, which is part of our Unity Game Development Mini-Degree.

Save for later

Part 1

Part 2

Transcript Part 1

Transcript Part 2

Related Posts

File Download Link