I just started out this week with the GameDevHQ Unity course and learning group this week! What a challenging and rewarding set of material and people.
I am one of the team leads, and have several years experience using Unity, but never took a course in Unity. I’ve often felt a mediocre programmer, even though been writing code for years. In the past I’ve watched countless videos and read so many web entries generally focused on a narrow topic to help me overcome a particular issue.
So far, I’ve been amazed at the quality of the course material, and how even the basic beginning courses have ended up so often bestowing so much useful information that I somehow never ran across or knew after using Unity for some time.
These include things like:
- The FPS mode for Navigating the Scene (RMB + WASD), and scaling the sensitivity with the scroll wheel
- Clicking the question mark to get the web reference material to pop up with the right version right away
- Being able to reset the transform from the gear rather than type in zeros and ones
- Being able to better control and manage instantiations of object
- Clamping variable values
- Getting a more thorough understanding of Inheritance and Polymorphism with C++
The material is unusually well organized, broken into nice bite size chunks, and very concise and well sequenced.
There has been some other great general advise also like:
- A great “Pro_Layout”, the best Unity layout I’ve seen — also makes it easier for the team to work together with a familiar layout
- Don’t use autocomplete when doing the labs — I am lazy and want to use it, but agree it’s burning it into my memory far better typing everything in than using it.
- Emphasis on writing pseudo code before the actual code
Everyone in the group seems to show a real kindness and respect for each other, seems the Aloha spirit as permeated this effort. This is especially nice since the impact of Covid-19 and losing my job has really isolated me, and I so miss the social interaction this has helped to restore.
It’s definitely not easy, and especially for those with much less programming experience. But we are like a team working to reach the summit of Mt Everest, and helping each other to reach the next base camp.
I look forward to reporting out more of the positive energy and knowledge as this course progresses.
-Jeff
