Hey guys, as you’ve probably figured by the title, I’m extremely new to the Unity engine.
So far I’ve been loving everything about it and have been taking the first steps in seeing my game ideas finally come to fruition. (I’ve been inspired into finally taking up Unity after seeing the amazing stories from Rock, Paper, ShotgUNITY and Interstellar Marines)
I’ve been reading introductory books and getting some hands-on experience with everything from coding to animation, and from sound design to writing.
So, if you’re still with me and you’re interested in helping out me and the other newcomers in the Unity Community (which I hope to become very familiar with in the coming years), I have a few simple questions:
In your opinion; what is the most important lesson you’ve learned regarding Unity?
What is a favorite “secret” of yours regarding Unity design? (If you feel uncomfortable sharing anything “secret” just share a technique that newcomers would find helpful)
What was your first Unity project and what would be a good first project for a newcomer?
Thanks for your time and best of luck to all of you and your projects,
I consider myself lucky that I found the docs actually addictive and read them repeatedly. Google actually works really well at sniffing out unity issues I have too, and led to many solutions.
The biggest secret is that knowledge is power and experimention is absolutely key. You gotta just break things to fix things. Try every tutorial you come across, absorb it like a sponge and don’t look back. There’s no “secrets” in unity actually - everyone here just freely shares their knowledge as far as I’ve seen.
Secrets aren’t actually important - whatsoever. Intelligent people realise this, and know that the hard part is actually doing the work!
A driving game using Edy’s vehicle physics that killed me and made me realise I needed the tutorials after all I then went on to try and make my 20-year old game design concept, which I will get back to… but now I am 99% done on my game (putting finishing touches to it) and will be releasing on time in August.
Good luck with your unity journey. Oh and don’t bother trying to make an mmo as your first project. Start with pong. It’s not insulting, it shows you how unity works.
Welcome,
I suggest you have a look at some video tutorials and PDF guides.
The asset store is a good resource but some of the stuff there costs money.
Start small then when you get used to unity make bigger and better games.
@hippo The furthest my interests go are RPGFPS games, frankly the economic pressures and competition of the MMO market thoroughly scare me. Thanks for the great advice!
@nathan I’ve already obtained several tutorials, free and otherwise. Thank you for the support.
Hello TheBoxOfHope, and welcome to the Unity community!
I really agree what everyone else has said.
Just make sure that your having fun, starting small (unlike all of the people who want to make a mmo for there first project ), and know that you don’t have to do all of it yourself. There are a lot of sites that have royalty free music, and you can also download/buy 3d models.
Hope you have fun, and good luck!
PS If you’re interested in making a fps you might want to use this tutorial to help get you started.
Making a game in 3D can be so much fun and easy. Thanks to Unity
Read a lot. By a lot i mean Unity Forums(use the search if you are finding something), Unity answers. Anything Unity related. And the docs too. I guess Unity docs are first class. It’s just so easy and everything is in there. And yeah love Unity. Thats my secret. *winks.
My first was a strategy horror game of sort. It’s kinda messy. But i would recommend your first to be Lerpz from the tutorial section. And you can take a look at FPS making, It’s by far the easiest. IMO and it can also be very fun project too. But pitfalls, FPS is easy to make and also easy to fail too. So be careful.
That’s all i have to say. I guess. Happy working in Unity.
I’d suggest doing as many video tutorials as you can find for the first month or so. Then build yourself a simple project.
To answer your questions…
1.) The most important lesson I learnt in Unity, is that there is always something more to learn about Unity
2.) Secret : Learn all the keyboard shortcuts, this helps improve time and efficiency
3.) Everyone does pong. I did a 3D table tennis game for my first complete project. It worked out great.
What a great post. Simply fantastic! You have the right attitude for success already. As I just discussed in another thread, writing games is hard. Too many people come to Unity thinking its a 30 minute journey to $$$ with a big fat easy button. It’s not. It’s a journey of learning and discovery. You have started with the idea of learning, which sets you on the right path to mastery.
Learn in small chunks. Don’t start with a full game concept. Instead, pick up a tutorial and walk through their ideas. Then, each day you work on it, pick a small topic that is kind of interesting. Add a tiny little thing here, a tiny little thing there. Everything we know about learning shows us that success begets more success. Start with big goals and you’ll get frustrated. At the same time, we know that you should begin with the end in mind. Therefore, pick a goal like, ‘learn more about building games’ that is learning focused, rather than performance oriented.
It’s not a secret, but I was really excited when I learned to use the WWW capability to talk to my database server. I use dreamhost, and it was pretty straight forward to setup a php script, pass variables along from unity using WWW and then accessing my database safely on the server. I was completely and totally stoked the first time!
I began by working with other people’s tutorials and I totally recommend going that way. There are other threads that point you to them, but the tornado twins did a 27 part one that was really great. I think this is the start of it: How to make a video game [unity 3d basics] part 1.
This is the mental voice that peers over your mind’s shoulder, constantly muttering, “That’s utter, utter crap! I’ve SHAT better code than that! Call that a user interface!? HAH!” etc. It’s very easy to let it win.
Don’t let it beat you down. There WILL be times when you’ll look at your project and you’ll have to mentally drag yourself into your seat and do some more work on it, because you’re heartily sick and tired of it. You’ll spend far, far more time making your game than any player will ever spend playing it, so this is normal.
Push through it. Finish what you start. Because only finished games ever get released.
Also: Programming is not maths, no matter what many others will claim. It’s just translation.
Bizarrely enough, my first Unity project was the “Lerpz” 3D Platformer Tutorial—I was hired to write it. Prior to that tutorial, I knew a lot less about Unity than I thought I did.
Then again, I also wrote the user guide for Renderware 3 way back in 2000-2001. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that I knew precisely f*ck all about 3D graphics, and was absolutely terrible at maths—hence my earlier point about programming not being about maths: I started programming in 1981 and have released games to my name. If I could do it, so can you.
Quite a lot of the problems you’ll face have been covered and are on the web to read about and learn from.
I’m not good enough with it to have “secrets”!
I’d pick a simple design such as a 2D style game mechanic and do that. My first Unity game is a Galaxians style. So you just use all the same things you would in 3D but don’t do any movement on the Y axis. Galaxians has a simple gameplay and will cover a fair bit of the game loop you’ll need to know for larger games.
The book I bought demonstrated how to write a simple 3D arcade/adventure type and that also seemed pretty straighforward. As with everything the devil is in the detail. You might put the basic game together in a week and think you’re making great progress. Next thing you know you’ve spent another week just trying to fine tune the movement. It’s the detail that will set your game apart. If your happy tweaking and tweaking over and over then this is the discipline you’ve been looking for!
Once you have completed a basic game or two why not try a competition, great fun and help hone your game development ‘muscles’!
Ludum Dare (create a game from a theme in 48hours) is a good one for that, plenty of people create great stuff with unity for LD and standard entries include the source code!
I’m sorry I wasn’t able to respond earlier (busy day, etc, etc), thank you for the answers! I especially like the Ludum Dare idea, and the “shit bird” concept. I’m well into my first introductory book and I will be sure to watch multiple tutorials.
I think what I’m going to do after the tutorials is have two different paths towards the same end at the same time.
One starting with basic programming for simple 2d games, then go into more structured 2d games, and finally work into more complicated code for 3d games.
The other starting with simple digital art (3d concept builds), working into animations, and finally into immersive interactive 3d environments.
And from there it is a matter of trial and error moving from project to project until I feel confidant enough to attempt a full-scale production title for the indie market. (if I ever take that path)
So, I’d like to once again thank everyone here who has helped or has shown interest. I look forward to
You get what you pay for. Don’t get me wrong – Unity is awesome! Despite being free, it has a simplistic yet elegant UI and is quite versatile. However, because it is free, it attracts a lot of “other people”. The community is decent half the time, and there are absolutely brilliant people who take part in the community who I would not be opposed to having deep philosophical conversations with. But the other half of the time, you encounter people who seem to enjoy insulting the gamedev community with their arrogance and laziness. I swear, there was one day not too long ago when every other question in UA practically read “I know nothing about gamedev and stumbled upon Unity while searching for pr0n. I want to make a game with it, so hand over any and all assets you have.” I’m serious. That happens occasionally. I’ve bitten my tongue so many times that I have band-aid adhesive marks all over it.
A Unity newbie should stick to his/her area of expertise for the first five days or so, soaking up every bit of knowledge on that area as much as humanly possible, before expanding to other areas of expertise. Taking on too much at once isn’t recommended. Obviously, one can do otherwise, especially if that person is an intellectual alpha, but I don’t encounter too many of my kind online. XDDD (Just kidding… partially… =P)
I don’t really have the time to work on my projects as much as I would care to, so I have not officially finished a single project yet. I have unfinished projects here and there that function as expected and can therefore be classified as “games”, but they are not polished enough to warrant my seal of approval. But if I were to lower my standards just for the sake of discussion, I suppose my first “finished” Unity project would be that Bomberman clone I made using ripped sprites.
EDIT:
Programming is part logic, part math and part application. It’s not pure math, but saying that it has nothing to do with math is simply fallacious.
Very misguided. The only reason why you were “successful” at programming without being highly adept at math is because somebody else was. If every programmer in the world was horrible at math and only got by by using premade math libraries, then there would be no more advances in programming. Computer graphics, encryption, electronic programming – all these employ some significant degree of mathematics. Just because past programmers already provided us with the libraries and algorithms we need for the more common problems in programming doesn’t mean we should disregard the importance of math in the field of programming. Those people would certainly vouch for the part math played in the advancement of programming and people who are still advancing the field would claim the same. I don’t know what your success in programming entails, but just because you say you got by without excelling in math doesn’t mean someone who doesn’t even know what the Pythagorean theorem is would. (If I was to hire between a seasoned programmer who only knows algorithms learned from rote memorization and a recently graduated programmer who has adequate knowledge in logic and math, I would hire the latter. The former would be most useful if I wanted to make a clone of some game with an openly distributed source code, while the latter can create effects that have never been done before.)
