I hear you there. I have two daughters 10 and 7. They demand a great deal of my time. At the same time they are distracting me they are pressuring me to finish the next game (section) or at least get them to playable states. Then, if I let them, they’d hog the computer so they can play them and not let me get any work done hehe.
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lol… gotta love that…
I actually found my son was really useful when it came to testing and feature suggestions. For example, with Block Breaker, you could get your girls to sit down with some squared paper and colour in 2 blocks to represent a “block” and design a few levels. Then, either you go create them, or better still, show them how to by dragging the prefabs etc. When they play it next they will be super delighted that they have contributed and can play their own designed levels 
My son will often be hearding stating, “it’s good, but I would like it to do this…” - can’t put a price on that feedback
If you have any other devices (phones/tablets etc), Glitch Garden is the first where you are shown how to push it from Unity to a device, that way they could play it and you could still use the PC 
Yeah they would like that. I did make the different colored blocks spell out their names on the different levels. They got a kick out of that. And yes we have android phones and a couple iPads.
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I actually have a laptop I could let them play on as well. But as soon as I start a new course then it is all about that one and the previous finished projects are all but forgotten. That is, they don’t care about playing them. They want me to hurry up and finish the next one so they can proceed to forget that one as well.
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Awww… sounds like they are having a blast with you taking this course Hans
If you are not familiar with it, I’d recommend a read up on SCRUM. You could make them “Product Owners”, have fortnight development iterations, then hand the product back to them for a couple of weeks. This would let you carry on with the next bit whilst they find all the bugs and come back to you with a rich features list 
Great to have them involved, how fab
The short attention span generation hehe
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The problem with that is the sky would be the limit on their requested feature list and I am stuck on the ground floor.
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hehe… that’s ok… that’s manageable, as the more you progress the more you will learn and be able to return to those desired features. You would put them on the “backlog”. For the ones you can do straight away, they could “prioritise” them…hehe… you’d have a fantastic little production line going there… hehe… also, the ones that seem more challenging would be a fantastic way of stretching yourself to learn even more.
I bet you are really glad you continued this conversation with me now… lol… sorry
Hehe it’s all good. It would definitely be a good learning experience. And I can tell you just how it would play out. I’d toil and tear my hair out to get the feature in that they wanted. They’d play it once and say, “Cool. Now can you add this?”
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…better than showing no interest and just returning to their mobiles… hehe… I can bearly break my lad away from the XBox these days, and the days of actually playing together on it seem over. When I can’t play with him on it I can’t seem to justify the time for playing Lego Star Wars or something like that… he’s all about the Call of Duty and so on… *sigh*…
My oldest daughter would be face down on my wife’s iPad playing Minecraft to the exclusion of eating and sleeping if we allowed it.
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lol… yeah, he had a bit run on that too, we did a fair bit together actually… quite the consumer of time, but it was always interesting seeing what he built.
One interesting thing I have noticed about taking this course is that it has made me more aware of features or lack there of in other games. An example I play games on XBox with my brother who lives about 3 hours away. The current game we are playing is 7 Days to Die…think Minecraft in the zombie apocalypse. It has the Unity spashscreen at the start so I know it was developed in that. What I noticed though is that they seemingly have all the sounds that play set to 2D because no matter where you are in relation to anything the sound being played is omnipresent not directional. So you might hear a zombie groaning and realize there is one at your wall. But you can’t use the surround sound to track down where it is which is frustrating.
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It is surprising how many of these things you start to notice as you work through. That’s a fairly good spot to notice something like the sound and obviously how it affects the player’s experience, in this case your own, but that is then something which you may well consider in more depth when it comes to creating your own games. Kinda cool
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Another thing is that the game has weather effects one of which is rain. The rain is always accompanied by dense fog. The fog likewise is omnipresent including inside more or less sealed buildings. Makes it difficult to see and doesn’t really add much to the game especially due to the overuse of the effect.
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Fog/smoke inside buildings used to occur on games like Quake and such, was really annoying and something which spoilt the effects. Lighting leaching through walls too was another of these details.
Someone, somewhere has a daughter who raised both of these issues with her father, but they were scored as low priority and as such they were never addressed
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Hehe yeah. It’s the combination of the frequency of the rain (at least once a day) and the fact that fog is ALWAYS present when it rains that makes it so noticeable and unrealistic. So they have a fog system that is sub-par at best (all pervasive and uniformly dense) and then lean so heavily upon the effect as to use it daily (in game time) that makes it ludicrous. If the weather/fog system isn’t working and you haven’t prioritized fixing it then maybe don’t call on it until it looks and works better.
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And to be honest it could be in part the result of a rush job port. It’s primarily a PC game that was ported to XBox but seemingly not optimized for it. PC people seem to have a better experience to some degree but I think mostly because on a PC you have more access to the graphics interface.
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hmmm… interesting…
I seem to recall there was a default “fog” effect in Unity, but it just made the horizon less visible I think, at least when I used it ages ago I think that was the case… so for a given radius around the player there wasn’t any fog. Unless there were a lot of settings I never meddled with it sounds as if this may be a different type of asset.
It’s handy to notice these things, as I said earlier they will help to make your own games even better - good to have a keen eye
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Not been a particularly productive week on the Unity course front. Afraid if I don’t get back to it soon all the knowledge accrued will leak out of my aged brain.