Making a Mobile Game with Unity 3D and Playmaker - Setting up the Environment

Beginner Game Design tutorial series creating a simple Bounce type game using Playmaker within Unity 3D. In this first video, we will set up the walls and making them bouncing with a physics material. Absolutely NOCODE. Also check out How to Create a Skateboard Game: https://bit.ly/2IZSQwm 👉🏼

This kicks off a series building a mobile bounce game — think Pong or Brick Breaker territory — with a twist: viewer feedback decides how the game gets finished. Part one sets up the project for portrait mobile development and builds the physical environment the ball will bounce inside: four walls with the right physics so nothing ever loses energy.

Set up a portrait workspace

Undock the Game window and re-dock it beside the Scene view so you see both at once. Mobile means portrait, so instead of the default 16:9 you want 9:16: click the aspect dropdown (Free Aspect), hit the plus icon, and add a fixed resolution named mobile portrait at 1080 wide by 1920 tall. Everything you build from here on stays inside that frame, so you're never surprised by what a phone screen will actually show.

Build the first wall

Add a 3D cube and scale it tall enough to cover the screen edge. Before duplicating it, get its physics right once. The cube already has a Box Collider; add a Rigidbody, uncheck Use Gravity so it doesn't fall, check Is Kinematic, and freeze all position and rotation constraints — this wall must never move, only be bounced off.

Create the bounce material

In the Materials folder, right-click, Create, and pick Physic Material near the bottom; name it bounce. Set both friction and static friction to 0 so the sides are slick, and bounciness to 1 — the scale runs 0 to 1, so that's 100%. Then set Bounce Combine to Maximum. This last setting matters: when two objects collide, Unity has to decide whose bounciness wins, and Maximum guarantees the ball always rebounds at full energy instead of gradually dying out.

Duplicate into a frame

Now duplicate the wall for the right side, then duplicate again for the top — rescale that one short and wide and slide it to the top of the view. Duplicate once more for the bottom, which will get special treatment later (that's where game over lives). Zero every wall's Z position; cubes spawn slightly toward the camera, and a stray Z offset will quietly ruin collision alignment. Name them wall left, wall right, wall top, and wall bottom, create an empty game object called Sides to act as a folder, and parent all four under it. The walls will eventually be invisible, so exact prettiness doesn't matter — position does. Next up: the ball and the paddle that make this thing bounce.