Good day guys,
Thought as I progress through the course I would give a bit of my personal feedback from a student’s point of view! All can be taken with a grain of salt, and are just some observations!
User experience prior to starting this course, as a base of reference:
- Started the original Unity Course, made it through the brick breaker challenge and ended up having to stop do to work taking me out of province for an extended period of time.
- Upon returning from work, realized I forgot most of what I had learnt and would have to start over, saw the Unreal course was on sale, and grabbed it figured why not see what the other engines are like, and knowing the instructors would be the same! After getting into it realized it honestly is at a skill level that is a bit higher than Unity was, and some things I was liking about unity out-weighed the ‘perks’ of the unreal engine, and decided to go back to unity with this new course!
Things I’m Enjoying about the new course
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First off, the project choices this time around are great! I love how for the first terminal hacker project you took something as ‘boring’ as a console game, and made it actually fun! It is essentially still just a console game, but adding the atmosphere of it being an old Terminal and the sound effects and everything it was great! I also like that we are jumping into 3D right away, I understand 2D is easier to work with, but know a lot of students including myself really want to dive into the 3D game development.
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VERSION CONTROL! Thank you, I like that we jump into this right away, I honestly knew nothing about it before seeing it in the Unreal course, and I like how you brought it back a little more simplified in this course, and are easing us into it gradually to help us understand!
Something I think could be Added to the first or second Section
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So the first and second section, as you stated in one of the videos was for beginners, but you did mention even if you have some programming knowledge to stick around through the videos to learn the syntax, and coding standards etc.
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I was thinking maybe before you get into those two sections, you could have a video that you can tell the people who are familiar with coding ie: understand what variables, methods/functions, loops and statements understand white space, and just some basic programming knowledge, to continue watching, and those who are unfamiliar to move on to the next video and continue on with the section. Within this video, it could just be a brief video (10-15 Minutes) where you can just go through the syntax of how these are used in C# (for people coming from other languages, and just as a refresher for those who once used it) a breakdown of includes, formatting, etc, that way at the end of the video if you feel like ok I’m caught up this makes sense to me, can jump right into the next sections, or if you’re like well ok I get what he was saying, but I feel like i need to practice this a bit more, you can continue on with the section.
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The reason I suggest this is, I kept watching through section 2, hoping to get to some parts I knew I would be rusty on, like your shuffle algorithm for the word shuffle, but a lot of this code was all behind the scenes and was introduced to us as a pre-made function, I feel I got some benefit from watching through the videos since I have very very minor programming experience, however still feel like I would have been completely comfortable skipping those two sections completely and moving right into Section 3.
Whats the take away from all of this?
The course is great! It’s very neat seeing how GameDev.tv is evolving through its courses, and it is just getting better and better!
Cheers,
Matthew
P.s. I remember you saying in one of your first videos in section 1 if I’m not mistaken, when you introduced us to this community website, and it showed the original unity section of the boards, and you mentioned not to worry about that because soon it wont exists. What did you mean, and what does that mean to those of use who have that course as well?