Hi Gamedev.tv team, I just wanted to provide some feedback for the Toon Tanks section.
Firstly I’ll say thank you for taking the time and effort to keep the course up to date and relevant, and please don’t take any of the following points personally! For a bit of context, I had completed the original Battle Tank section just as it went into archive. I came in with the expectation that I wouldn’t necessarily learn much, but would be a good opportunity to solidify what I had already learnt.
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No mid section quizzes?
I found these to be extremely valuable, not just in terms of making sure I understood certain concepts, but also in terms of setting goals for each day/session and feeling some sense of achievement and progress. -
Too concise
One of the things that made Battle Tanks such a great section for me, was that it was clear that the goal was to learn, not to make. Being really clear what the goal of each lecture was, giving space to think about how we will get there, giving lots of opportunities to find your own solutions (outside of the challenges) before being shown, teaching how to find your way through the documentation, intentionally ‘trapping’ us into bad code, so we have to refactor to improve our functionality. -
Monotonous
I appreciate that not everyone can have Ben’s unwavering enthusiasm, however this section felt clinically scripted. There were too many instances of “We need Y so I’m going to declare X and call function Y with these parameters”, giving no chance to think for ourselves. An example of this is the “Creating a Health Component” lecture, where the class is setup for most of what we need, but we are never asked to consider what the class needs in the context of this game before it is dumped into code for us. -
Assets
Having all the assets ready to go from the first lecture is great - we already covered a lot of asset management in the Building Escape section so it was nice to not need to deal with that in this section!
All in all, while I think this section comes out with a nicer “product” compared to Battle Tanks, and avoids a lot of the painful physics problems, I am worried that it won’t be particularly valuable to beginners as it heavily lacks the suggestions to figure out things on your own and really learn from doing so!
Looking forward to starting on the shooter - that’s enough time staring at tanks for now! 