Hello,
I would like to give my thoughts about the course now that I have finished it. I apologize in advance for my poor English (I read and understand it just fine, but lack practice writing it).
First I think it is a good course, with good insights how to organize the code, and the assets.
And the final result, the game, looks good to my eyes. It feel more like a game than a simple prototype. It is also build in a scalable way, with room for improvement like bot players, more units, etc, without having to change too many things.
But I also feel there are points of improvements. Not much about the game or the code, but much more about the “teaching style”, and the structuring of the course itself.
I am an experienced programmer (more in the web development), but I found this course pretty difficult to follow. Not because it is overwhelming complex, it is more about the …. overall flow ?
I did not have the same problem with the courses for Unreal, or for Unity RPG, by Sam Pattuzzi.
I also agreed the feedbacks here :
« My main criticism is around the lack of understanding of the architectural choices before typing the code. Designing and entity model how things communicate where information resides (server/client) and what does need to be communicated. »
For me, the most important thing that I wanted to learn in this course, is WHY should we build things this way or that way ? We learn HOW to do it, but not WHY.
Showing how something work is not the same as teaching about it.
And they are many videos where there is just too much things scrammed/rushed into one session. And sometimes things that are not related at all.
We build the beginning of the lobby in the video … « Selecting Multiple Units ». And then we do almost nothing about it for 50 % of the course, and we finish the lobby at the end.
At this point, it just make it playing and testing the game cumbersome. The building of the lobby should have been done at the end, even the first part of it. There was no reason to do it that way.
Nathan is also way too fast in his speaking, his coding with use of IDE autocompletion, and his configuration of components values. When something is written, there is no commenting of that, we immediately jump to something else, making the task of writing the same code frustrating. And I often miss the correct configuration of some components because it was done in the split of a second.
For others courses, I can follow along and write the code and understanding it when doing so. Not this course. I add to use the gitlab repository, copy coll the changes of the lectures into my code, and then listen to the lecture. I started to use this strategy at the middle of the course, after thinking giving up for another course, and it become much more easy for me to follow.
Overall, I think Nathan is a smart and skilled dev (more than me I presume). But lack the experience in teaching. I was interested in the course « Unity 3rd Person Combat & Traversal » by him, but after this experience, I am hesitant to buy it.
If anyone have done the two courses, feel free to share your thoughts.
I hope I was not coming as too harsh, and my remarks may help make better courses.
Thank you for reading.