Struggling to keep up

Unity Courses Talk
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#1

I can tell Gary is very experienced and loves this line of work and I think that’s great.

I’m struggling to keep up and my label colors no longer change when they’re expected to change.

I feel like I’m writing code and he’s two or three lines ahead of me making it impossible to listen to anything he’s saying. This is the third time something stopped working and now I gotta go back and re-watch videos and compare. It’s a struggle. I’ve had all day to learn and I haven’t picked this up until the day is nearly over because I’m dreading having to troubleshoot what my issue is(I do understand this is part of the overall learning process too). I didn’t want to post about anything but I really been irked all day about it.

Long story short, my labels on my tiles are no longer changing color period. No idea why or when it started. I feel like I’m gonna lose a lot of valuable time over troubleshooting it especially when I don’t know what half my code even does. I apologize for being somewhat of a debbie downer, just a little frustrated. I’ve hardly learned anything from this project, just trying to keep up and I’m missing a lot. May end up having to just watch the videos so I can understand what he’s doing and then begin coding again in the next project.

I will try to fix the labeling color issue but if I cannot figure it out today then I’m going to watch the rest of these videos and move on. I will post a solution if I find it.

I do apologize for venting. I think I’m curious if I’m the only one or if anyone has any advice other than rewatching the videos.

I do very much appreciate the work put into every lecture. Project Boost is prob my favorite so far.

6 Likes
#2

Hey @demedrian,

Sorry to hear you’re feeling frustrated with trying to keep up. The good news is that it just means you’re being challenged and learning something new! And you’re definitely not the only one. Everyone has different experience levels and will find some sections easier than others, and the pace of the course isn’t custom tailored to each student which can be a challenge.

A couple of things you could try:

  • Reduce the playback speed of the videos to give yourself more time to follow along.

  • Don’t try to type while he’s explaining (I usually watch him write out a section of code and pay attention to him explaining it, then before he moves on I pause the video and type the code out, make sure I understand what’s going on, then either rewind a bit until I understand or I continue).

  • If you don’t want to lose time to troubleshooting (and you’re copying the lecture’s code and not adapting it to your own project), there’s nothing wrong with copying the lecture code. It is linked in the resources section (This Lecture’s Project Changes) and you can download it from the GitLab repo and just replace your code to hopefully get it working again.

The best thing you can do is keep a positive attitude, be patient with yourself, and stick with it! :grin:

3 Likes
#3

Thank you for your response and your optimism.

I think Rick versus Gary’s way of instruction are quite different. I can easily keep up and learn from Rick’s instruction. It was definitely challenging keeping up and learning from Gary the same way.

Thank you for the suggestions, I will surely apply them in the future.

5 Likes
#4

I’m finding the same. I can keep up much better from Rick’s material. Gary is clearly knowledgable, but I find he shows rather than explains, which is fine until something doesn’t quite click as he’s typing, and then I’m finding I just get more and more lost. I was doing ok up until this lecture, but I’ve hit the point of wanting to know what Vector2Int.right, up, down, etc do and why we’re using them. The documentation tells me what values they represent, but right now I’m puzzling over what they really mean in this context. Hopefully it will become clear imminently.

4 Likes
#5

Same I am getting quite lost with the nodes and lists. I think Gary is an experienced coder and a good teacher, but I am struggling to pick up what each part does. The parts I do understand are the parts where I don’t have to rush to type out the code he is writing. I didn’t even attempt the challenge because I was getting so lost in the lecture and previous lectures.

1 Like
#6

Sorry to hear that you are having difficulty keeping up with the course. I am glad however that you felt comfortable enough to explore those feelings and frustrations with your peers.

Learning something new can be a challenge. Learning something new from a new person can amplify that challenge. When that something is programming, it can bring about frustration very quickly.

I understand that feeling.

There have been some excellent ideas from other fellow students. One of the things that I find helps is simply stepping away from the computer for a short time. Watch a TV show, grab some food, whatever relaxes you… but do it away from the computer.

Another suggestion would be to remember you are learning this on your time. There is no race between you and other people doing this. The only prize in the end if your own programming knowledge and troubleshooting skills you learn during the process.

Trust the process.

One benefit from learning from different people (Gary vs Rick in this instance) is that you get to see things from a different perspective. Even Gary’s approach to the interface is a little different than Rick with the Hierarchy off to the right instead of on the left.

Once you find your own groove and understand how you learn best, you will be teaching the rest of us I’m sure.

Best of luck and feel free to reach out if you have further issues.

#7

I’m in the same boat bit of a struggle in this one understanding the 2nd half. Something that has been beneficial to me has been using the following prompt in chat gpt:

Prompt: Please explain the following code to an absolute beginner by refactoring it to include explanation comments: [Insert Code Here]

It will give you something like this back:

void ExploreNeighbors()
{
// Create a list to store the neighboring nodes
List neighbors = new List();

    // Iterate through each direction in the directions array
    foreach (Vector2Int direction in directions)
    {
        // Calculate the coordinates of the neighboring node
        Vector2Int neighborCoords = currentSearchNode.coordinates + direction;

        // Check if the grid contains the neighbor's coordinates
        if (grid.ContainsKey(neighborCoords))
        {
            // Add the neighbor to the list of neighbors
            neighbors.Add(grid[neighborCoords]);

            // TODO: This section is for testing purposes and should be removed later
            // Mark the neighbor as explored
            grid[neighborCoords].isExplored = true;
            // Mark the current search node as part of the path
            grid[currentSearchNode.coordinates].isPath = true;
        }
2 Likes
#8

I feel the same, Im struggling to follow Gary and I often find myself coping like a parrot and if a problem occurs I will have no idea how to fix it. I don’t want to pass So I think Il just watch the videos without practicing and jump straight to the zombie course with Rick. I find Gary very hard to follow since he doesn’t fully explain his logic (like deleting something wee did while I don’t understand why) and moving through advanced concepts with no proper introduction.

#9

Yeah, with Gary happens a lot, but mostly because he dip in very complicate stuff with lots of moving parts, on top of that there is some C# stuff that for a beginner can be daunting to understand, especially when we start going out the confort zone of the Unity / monobehaviours stuff and start playing around with pure classes and constructors, then more stuff like List, Dictionaries etc etc

And the problem most people have is right there, C# works a little bit differently from the cozy monobehaviours, and some stuff that is really basic knowledge, doesn’t make very sense from the point of view of a beginner.

Some time ago i had the same complaint about these lessons, than someone suggested me to spend a bit of time learning from the side a bit of C# and when i came back i had a much easier time following the lectures…

Gary stuff still hard as nails, but atleast i have the knowledge to understands most of the times whats really happening in the code.

The book C# player’s guide is a great way to introduce you to C# in a simple way, it has a lot of little exercize to nail down everything it teaches to you, and you will learn stuff that probably you will need to know as a dev anyway.

1 Like
#10

Thats awesome, thanks for the book recommendation. I’ll start reading right away.

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