I’ve been loving the Unity 2D courses so far.
But I’ve seen a lot of problems understanding
Quiz Master>Simple timer and Connecting the timer.
It feels like I’m just copying… I believe there should be more explanations, I’m creating variables and functions just because. I will of course just try to re-watch and analyze as many times as possible. But still it fees like is a long explanation made short.
Wrong section, I am going to assume you wanted the Unity talk not the Blender talk and move your post there.
It can start off like that.
I suggest: Do the challenges. Fiddle with things. Try different ways to accomplish the task at hand. Google/read the unity docs to learn more about any topic where you feel you want to go deeper.
Woops, sorry I believe I choose the wrong one, thanks.
100 % agree with you. I was feeling so good before I started Quiz Master. I think he just goes way to fast and even with the power of pause I feel like having to go back so many times has me frustrated and just wanting to zone out and copy him instead of understand what it is I am doing and why I am doing it. I feel like the first 2 projects took a slower pace and this one feels like someone threw me into the deep end of the pool before I was ready. 3 or 4 of the lessons from Quiz Master were great and easy to understand so not everything felt rushed.
I completely agree- this whole section really needs more explanation as to what is happening. The sections before felt like I was learning and feeling really good about the course overall; this section feels like I’m hitting a brick wall and I’m too dumb to figure out how to navigate it.
keep pushing on, I found the next one with Rick was great and helped out a ton. I think the main thing I took away from this one is just how to work with the buttons and set up a UI.
I haven’t done the updated 2D course so I can’t accurately point out exactly what is going on but after seeing Gary’s code and comparing it with Rick’s code in previous sections I can see why you guys are struggling, the code is great, but is not beginner-friendly, at least not from my perspective, the timer script is particularly convoluted.
Since you guys are having issues, I suggest you check exactly where you had trouble following the instructor and send the feedback to the team so they revamp those videos or maybe even the whole section.
I completely agree. I was really enjoying the previous sections from Rick, but this one I’m really struggling to follow along and see the logic in what’s being done. I keep finding I’ve missed bits or maybe misunderstood bits, and am having to do a lot of digging about to figure out what. But at least I’m learning from the digging!
Case in point - I spent quite a while going back and forth trying to fix my quiz. Totally my mistake - I’d created the Timer class with a lower case T, so when I added “Timer timer”, it didn’t find the class and I got a warning in VS Code suggesting me various namespaces it might be in. I sorted it in the end, but I hadn’t clicked that we were instantiating our bespoke class there, it seems a pretty important concept to not even be mentioned.
Hey everyone!
I’ve been listening to the feedback and I totally agree that this section moves way too fast for people who are new to programming.
I am currently reviewing the existing lectures and looking at what additional content is needed to make the section more approachable and understandable.
This will involve adding some additional explanations to existing lectures, as well as recording some brand new lectures that cover new programming concepts in more detail.
So, if there are any specific things you found particularly difficult to understand then please let me know and I’ll make sure I address them in the course.
As a little backstory, this section was actually completed before Rick had started on the ‘Snow Boarder’ section and it was assumed that certain programming concepts and topics would have already been covered by the time you got to ‘Quiz Master’. This is one of the reasons I spend more time explaining the UI side of things and less on the code side.
Unfortunately, a few things in the ‘Snow Boarder’ prototype got moved around and changed, which has left a rather large skill gap between the two sections.
I totally understand how frustrating the section must be at the moment and I’ll be doing everything I can to fix it up.
Thanks for the reply Gary - I see why it feels like it skims over some bits. I’m still following it and learning a lot. Hoping to finish the course in the next few days - it’s been really instructive overall.
Thank you so much for this explanation, that makes a lot of sense! I too was feeling like the transition between Rick’s courses and yours was quite jarring and seemed to expect a lot of foreknowledge that wasn’t provided prior to starting Quiz Master.
As my contribution to how this could be better explained/paced, I feel like there is a lot of front-loading happening in the setup of scripts without a lot of detail as to why we’re setting them up this way. I’ve always found that once a particular section is complete - displaying the question text, changing the button state, etc - I can go back and reverse engineer why all of that setup was needed and properly understand what the script is doing. However, until I can see the finished result of a particular section, it is all very nebulous and I’m basically just going through the motions trusting that it will all come together in the end. Again, up to this point (I’m currently at the timer section) it always has and so I am learning to trust the process, but I do feel that a bit more hand-holding would be super helpful to those of us with very limited scripting knowledge.
Thanks for listening and incorporating your students’ feedback into your courses. It’s very encouraging and will make me want to always prioritize GameDev.tv courses over other courses available.
Thank you for explaining this. Reading these posts makes me feel like I’m not alone in messing up the challenges. The course is great and I’m learning a lot but this explains the discrepancy between the pacing of quiz master and snow boarder.
As feedback, a little editing in the videos dealing with indexes and classes would be helpful. For example, I’m still struggling to understand why I need to type “buttonImage = answerButtons [index].GetComponent();” into the code instead of “buttonImage = answerButtons .GetComponent();” without the word “index” in the brackets, and significance of specifying it as class “Image buttonImage;” before that section.
I messed up on the challenge of setting the countdown image of “timerImage.fillAmount = timer.fillFraction;” because I just put “timerImage.fillAmount = fillFraction;” and I’m guessing the mistake I made was that I needed to specify grabbing the “fillFraction” variable from the timer script but I’m still not sure if I’m correct about that. Editing in a little explanation of the significance of this code formatting with an example of what happens if done wrong and why could help out greatly (feel free to even use my mistake here as an example).
Thanks for responding! I’m kind of relieved other people felt this way, because I was beginning to feel a bit thick after I’d just had a good jog through lessons one and two and then just sat here looking at the challenges with my jaw agape and my mind blank. I imagine it’s frustrating on your end, since you made a quite good course here–it’s just been scheduled relatively earlier in our learning journey than you were led to believe it would be.
As far as more actionable feedback, where I feel like I’m really struggling isn’t so much this or that specific exercise as much as feeling very lost in terms of, for lack of a better term, the ‘mid-level’ vision of what we’re doing. At a high level, I grasp that we’re making a quiz game as a means of learning the UI. And at the low level, each individual variable, function, etc., is lucidly explained.
However, I’ll often be stuck scratching my head and left wondering “Alright, so I put this line of code here and it does the thing, but… why? Why’d we do this step now, and why’d we use this function or this arrangement of nested statements, instead of some other way?”
What I think made the earlier sections easier was that there was a pretty clear outlining of, for example, “Gravity isn’t going to be sufficient to reliably power your character–you want a way to propel them along. So what we’re going to do next will make your snowboard move because it gives the surface collider a behavior like a treadmill, and that will give us a form of propulsion while we’re on the ground. So here’s how we’ll do that, step by step…”
There were clear visible things on the screen with real-world analogs and a set of things I could “hook onto” to understand why things did what they did and what we were accomplishing at that sort of level of “This is why we’re doing the thing and how it fits into the overall scheme of things, and here’s a real-world thing that it works like so you can get your head around it.”
In this case, many things are so abstract that I’m sort of flummoxed for anything to hook concepts onto, so when I’m called on for a challenge, I just sort of… stare at it, and feel like a numpty, because while I have a general idea of the concept of what we’re about, and I can understand the bits and bobs as you explain them, I can’t quite get to that level where I connect the two and can reason out how to take the next step.
Maybe some of this is also the nature of the game–it’s buttons and questions rather than rockets and mountains, so it’s naturally more abstract, but I do wish there was a bit more ‘roadmapping’, so to speak.
As it is, I kind of feel like I’ve been told, in a very broad sense “We’re going to Edinburgh,” and then given step by step instructions to follow, but at each new step, I don’t quite know where I am relative to Edinburgh or what mode of transport we’ll be taking or who’ll be driving, I just put one foot in front of the other and take each turn as I’m told, and I have the oddest sense of at once knowing full well that I’m on the right course and also being completely lost.
I am feeling that same way. I was doing so good feeling like I was getting what he was saying but then this hit and I felt flustered and panicked as I didn’t know what was really going on.
I find that when he flipped his logic in the timer script things stopped making sense and felt wrong. took me two hours to wrap my head about the reworking keep getting everything backwards for a bit.
Thank you very much for the explanation! Now all makes more sense, we’re waiting for the changes! thank you
i believe it has been a whole year please let us know when the new videos will come
Just wanted to also voice that, like others here, I felt incredibly frustrated once I reached the Quiz Master section (And Laser Defender). Quiz was the only project that ended up being broken, and I stopped caring for.
Finding this thread has made me feel a lot better about it.
To add to the feedback, I just think a lot more explanation needs to be given for each step. We need to be told what exactly we are about to do, and then how to do it, as well as why we’re doing it that way.
Entirely new concepts were skipped over, and I felt like I was just copy pasting what Gary was saying without fully understanding it. (Even with pausing and trying to figure it out).
Sometimes we even did something we had done in previous parts of the course, but in a new way, but the technique/format change was not explained at all, which made me feel really lost as to why we were doing it differently.
It’s also entirely possible that one or two additional projects or sections would be beneficial to help ease us in to the more complex things. Something for you to consider.
Seeing Gary’s explanation above is relieving. Really hoping that these sections will be improved for future students, because honestly, it does sully the high recommendation I would normally give about Gamedev courses. (Had a fantastic experience with the Unreal Blueprints one).
I’ll be eagerly awaiting. Thanks for listening to the feedback and updating the courses, you guys are great 
Hello,
I am currently studing the Quiz Master project, and feel that there is alot of logic brought into two scripts.
However, I think that being challenged like this forces students to break down things and analyze them, which is a skill that programmers have to cultivate anyway.
What is more, as a suggestion I would recommend a Flow-Chart to be given before the implementation and write pheudo-code in comments before we start implementing the if else nested logic.
Another suggestion would be to further break down the Quiz.cs into Display logic and State management logic
Thank you