Seems only fair after my post where I was disappointed with Rick’s teaching during Argon Assault I take the time to say that, for whatever reason, Rick is better with Realm Rush. Allowing him into the coding side of things is better than I expected as he brings a different, non professional, perspective, which I quite like.
Not that my praise of Rick matters ‘one jot’ but it would have been poor form for me not to mention it.
Hey Stephen, thank you for this post - your praise does indeed matter many jots and I appreciate you circling back with your thoughts to write this.
I read your previous comments and took them very seriously. Like all of the GameDev.tv instructors, I am constantly aiming to improve the quality of my delivery and overall value I bring to our community. On the RPG and most of the Unity 3D course (formerly Unity 2.0 course) my role has primarily been design / art / look and feel / production / etc. In both courses, Ben and I have been careful to not contradict ourselves or make changes in the other’s area of responsibility, and so there have been many times where I’ve rounded off my lectures with “Ben will cover this” or “dont worry about this yet” or “we’ll get to it later”. I think your previous comments highlighted the frustration with this, which I totally get. Moving forward we are being less rigid with this role differentiation and not “leaving it to the other person when they get to it” as we’ve been doing.
There has also been frustration from both Ben and I on how to best serve two somewhat mutually exclusive needs in our courses - how to show every step of the process on camera so that people dont get lost (which they do if we gloss over or too often show our work that was created offscreen) but also serve the need to keep the course interesting and about learning new approaches rather than implementing the same things many times. If you work through the RPG you’ll see a lot more of us building every last bit of it because we are trying to accurately show how a commercial game would be made. I am mindful though, that many people aren’t as interested in where we place our lights or how we constructed levels 3 to 8. I personally have found this challenging because I know the coders are not as engaged, and hence I can fall into the trap of glossing over, or rushing certain parts.
And of course, many of the new Unity features we are implementing (eg. Timeline), we haven’t spent a lot of time with and are often finding out the gotchas as we go. You correctly pointed out in your previous posts a couple of times when we made some missteps because of this. I know that personally there have been some lectures where I have had a gap in one part of my knowledge because I haven’t yet spent enough time with the new feature. For now, I’m spending 100% of my time working on Unity courses only so that I can be on top of the changes and give the best quality instruction.
I hope you’ll get a chance to work through the TileVania section which is now in the 2D course. I feel that we spent a good amount of time prototyping that section and ended up with some good, clean code. I teach most of the coding in that section which made it easier for me to be teaching the full picture in each lecture rather than just one sub-section.
Again, I appreciate your honest feedback. Its never a joy to receive blunt comments about how one is doing a bad job, but this truly is a powerful process for self-improvement and one which I welcome. I can promise you that every day I am aiming to be better than I was yesterday, and community feedback is one of my most valuable tools for doing so. I still have a lot of improvement I want to do.
Thanks for being an active member of our community and for caring enough to be vocal and honest with your feedback. And especially for your kind words in this post, it was very generous of you to take the time to write this.
Rick
Hi Rick, thank you for your thoughtful reply. As I work through this course I am beginning to appreciate the different approaches that each of you take. If I were to describe them I would say that Ben has a very ‘tight’ style whereas yours is looser more relaxed. Both have a place on a course such as this, it has taken me a while to understand that (I can be a bit slow).
I am looking forward to the RPG course next followed by 2D. The mini challenges are great as are the larger more ‘challenging challenges’ and these are the areas where I learn the most.
When I reach the end of the course I would be happy to give longer feedback if required.
Thank you again
Steve
Hey Steve,
Its great to see that you are getting value from the course. And you are quite right in terms of Ben and I having different styles - Ben is very passionate about the process of things and deconstructing the most complex of aspects into something simple to explain, whereas I am most passionate about creating a compelling experience for our player through whatever means available. Ben comes from the direction of how to be a programmer and I come from the direction of how to make games.
I look forward to seeing some of the results from your challenges and some of your own creative flair in the projects. As always, if you have any questions, we’re here to help.
Rick
You’ll be in for a treat on the RPG course Stephen, that was the first where Rick and Ben teach side by side. The differences in their approaches/teaching style/content is quite apparent, there’s also some humour whereby Ben sometimes spends a few minutes of a lecture “tidying up” from Rick’s looser style. You can almost feel his frustration 
This paints a very good picture of what it is like to work in small teams and how sometimes, peoples different ways/styles of working can lead to challenges. Whether it’s one guy that doesn’t always update the prefabs, or someone else who forgets to commit his changes to source control, or worst of all, that person who commits their own Visual Studio user preferences and forces warnings on all other team members installation about difference in tabs/spacing - gaaaahhh!! It really helps to highlight the importance of good communication in a team of any size, along with the frequency and content of it.
I can’t recall whether source control was covered at the start of the RPG, I don’t believe it was, but I could be wrong, but this is a good example of where both using it and having controls in place for how people use it can help. Creating a branch in Git would have enabled Rick to go off an be loose without creating any significant issues on the main branch of the project for Ben, and Ben could continue to be tight with his coding, without causing any significant issues for Rick.
Then they could just come together with pizza and beers for the Merge Party (think cage fighting)
Hey Rob
being a team of 1 I never thought about their team dynamics. A really good point. Maybe I will stick out on my own for a while longer 
Assuming of course I get to grips with coding
Hi Stephen,
There’s no harm in trying on a few hats before deciding which is the one you prefer. Perhaps its coding, perhaps its level design, perhaps its creating 3D models perhaps it creating music, perhaps its a several. Being a team of 1 enforces you to either buy assets or, or wear many hats. Sometimes though you may find there are too many hats to wear in order to accomplish the goal. When you have a feel for the hat you like best, that can be a good time to put a shout on on the #lounge:collaborate sub-forum and see who would be interested in wearing the other hats to form a small team.
/note to self - over use of the word “hats” 
Hey Rob,
out of interest have you completed the RPG course and are now on the 3D one?
If so could you share any other tips you might have to improve your coding/
thank you
As it happens I haven’t been through all of the content in the RPG course yet Stephen, I tend to just dip in and out of the courses to help people on the forum.
Regarding tips, that’s really quite broad and will invariably be different for each person. In my own case, going back almost 20 years (ouch!), I would say that one of the things which helped me learn was having something of my own to which I could apply what I was trying to learn. Long before online forums were two a penny I had wanted to add one to a gaming site I was looking after at the time, I decided that I would create one myself. This became my project. The content I needed to learn was in a lot of books, but I’m not one of those people who can just sit there and turn page after page, I need an example/project that I am interested in/care about to drive my own enthusiasm.
Each feature I added felt like an enormous success, in reality, it was probably very poorly written code, but what I was doing was forcing myself to learn. “Ok, so now how can I do this?” etc, and perhaps for that evening that would be the thing I would go off to try and work out. As time goes by you will find yourself writing similar pieces of code, similar approaches to doing things, these can be refined over time and improved on as you learn new ways of doing things.
As I say, everyone is different and learns at different rates and will grasps concepts more quickly/slower than the next person. It is important to remember that this is FINE. In the courses provided by GameDev.tv, where I suspect, if you are like many other students, you will gain the most from the courses, is if you take each game and really try to extend it yourself. Don’t focus on what you don’t know. Focus on what features you would like to add. Even if you don’t have all of the answers right now, chances are you will be able to ascertain the difficulty of some of the features, rate them, then order them, then fire through the easy win items first. Get a series of small success, it will drive your enthusiasm and confidence.
Share the projects you have created with the community, ask for feedback, pop a code example up of how you achieved something and ask “Does anyone have any thoughts on this?”, see what other people have to say, everyone will be at a different stage of their learning journey. Feedback on the projects is a great way to cultivate new ideas for the same games, and even if its a feature you don’t really want to add to the game, the “Ok, so how would I do that?” could be a really nice challenge in its own right.
When you get stuck, give it a little time, then take a step back. Perhaps you come back to it the following day, but step back, just take a break, do something else, let your head relax again for a bit. The number of times I have spent hours looking at a problem in the past only to give up on it later one night and then reluctantly look at it again the next morning, with fresh eyes, and realise a solution instantly is ludicrous, but it happens. Sometimes we can be our own worst enemies, for lacking the confidence in the way we are doing something, or berating ourselves for not working something out quickly enough. If there’s something you’re not grasping, stick at it for a little bit longer, see if its possible to break the problem down into smaller pieces, see if there is an achievement to be had from one of the smaller pieces before solving the whole issue. If you have spent some time on it, have been stuck, have taken a break, have tried again and you’re still stuck - ask for help. It’s not always something that comes easily to people, especially when those people are unknown, but this is a really friendly and supportive community and frequently people give up their time to help other people, from all around the world, with all different backgrounds, experience and abilities - its great. Likewise, when you can, reciprocate. There is a lot to be had from helping to answer other peoples questions, its also a great way to stretch yourself and learn.
Finding a suitable place / time is also handy. If you can find a quiet spot away from other distractions and be strict enough to sit yourself down and do the work, even if for just 20 minutes before you go off and do that thing before coming back and having another 20 minutes. Try to increase that duration as you continue (check out Pomodoro if you have any procrastination habits). Turn the phone off, or leave it in another room. Get the things you’re going to need ready and have them their with you. Comfortable chair, comfortable lighting. It may all sound a bit fluffy, but if you’re not comfortable you’ll be thinking more about how hard that chair is than on the code you’re trying to write, or straining your eyes in the darkness with just the glare of the computer screen at 2am.
Be kind to yourself. Try to focus on what you have achieved when you sit down for a coding/learning session, rather than what you haven’t. If there’s a little grey area on something, make a note of it, make that tomorrows goal, reward yourself and celebrate each little victory as they come. By doing so you will remain more positive, you’ll feel more confident in tackling the harder challenges and you’ll remain motivated to continue your learning journey.
There’s lots more I could go on to mention for projects, working in teams and so on, the above is perhaps more aimed at an individual. No one size fits all, so a lot of the above might just be obvious, not-relevant, or non-sense, but if there are a couple of things in the above that stand out for you, I hope they are of use.
Ok Rob it’s time to own up that you are Ben in disguise 
I think you nailed it. Thank you
LOL
I am but a mere mortal Stephen, and you’re very welcome