The other side of me after completed GameDev.tv online courses

Hi,

After completed few Blender and Unity courses, I still don’t feel confident enough to write an Unity game before the learning is documented.

I am C/C++ embedded engineer and programmer, learning C# is easier but it takes time to comfort myself with the way Unity C# scripting works, it is different from traditional programming.

Unity Editor has properties that can be created dynamically with statement like [SerializeField], this kind of new programming experience required some time for legacy programmer ( like me ) to get use to it, that is one of the reason that I do not participate in the GameDev.tv Game Jam event as it required raw understanding from its Unity courses, although I created the Project Boost game with mixture of terrain and spacecraft done by myself.

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There are many learning aspects to memorize from the Udemy or Youtube courses, the major problem is not easy to locate the relevant learning materials from the list of videos even with bookmark.

Therefore, I decided to share the approach I did before coding a game and the learning materials of Unity and Blender are documented something like below.

After documenting is done nicely, I can see clearly and locate reference areas easily. Understand there is Unity documentation online, but you have to base on what you have learned from the courses to apply to your first game development, and the reference process must be fast and handy in mind.

Surely, during the documenting process, I have to manually experience the Blender editing and Unity coding myself personally which require time to consume.

Secondly, a good teacher not necessary can delivers a good teaching. I recommended tutorials on Blender and Unity from Stefan Persson, Imphenzia. He delivered an easy-to-understand approach in learning Blender and Unity. I am looking forwards for his online courses, co-operation with GameDev.tv

Hopes, this help.

1 Like

I agree that is hard to look for specific parts from the courses, but I also think you should not memorize everything, it’s almost impossible since there are way too many things to cover, and both of these software update very regularly, meaning it’s virtually impossible to keep up to date with both while memorizing everything.

My suggestion is to start making your own games, they can be small projects, or enhance the games done during the courses. In my experience, no amount of knowledge will give you the confidence you need to make your own game because once you learn something, a new challenge will come up, and it turns into a never-ending learning experience, for instance, shaders.

I’ll share my story with you for some inspiration. I started developing my own games after finishing this tutorial: Roll-a-Ball - Unity Learn

As you can see it’s a really basic tutorial, but it was enough for me to start creating my own things, of course, the code was a huge spaghetti with no format, the game design was non-existent, and the art was awful, after asking for feedback in all regards I was able to keep pushing myself, my skill has reached a point were I’m able to create this little game in 3 days all by myself, definitely one of my biggest achievements because everything, except the music and sound, was created from scratch, and the main mechanic was not easy to pull off: Twilight Gal by Y33mmy

I’m not saying you should do the same, but sometimes, the right approach is to have no approach and just try things out and see how everything goes.

1 Like

hi Yee,

Thanks for the feedback and sharing, much appreciated.

Actually the materials taught in the courses are not that difficult, just the programming orientation in Unity is different, unlike legacy DOS game programming we can start coding and write to the screen 0xA000, Unity has Editor UI interaction to programming variables as part of the coding system including arrays, which is some kind of weird feeling that prevents the going.

Until I documented and get fluent of the Unity Editor programming flows, then only I can see clearly all this flying interactions in mindset, otherwise I will have some kind of “scare to start” feeling.

In fact, I did as per you said before writing this article, but this approach does not suits me well, leaving me in the dark. I need some crystal clear clarity to start with confidence.

By the way, definitely is impossible to memorize everything, I merely documented what had being taught from the online courses and to implement what had been taught to a new game also not an easy task to do.

Honestly, if I am not doing Unity now full time at my retirement, I don’t know how long an normal working adult without game programming knowledge before and can spare 1-2 hours time daily to accomplish game development nowadays using Unity and Blender, where both required quite some time to master though.

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