Beginner question: What to study

Getting Started
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Hey everyone, I’m starting my journey towards making a 2-d side-scrolling action adventure game via Unity. Since I have absolutely no art or programming experience to speak of, I’m fully aware that I’m several years away from even a playable prototype. Still, I have a dream, might as well pursue it. Anyway, I had a couple of questions before starting my journey.

  1. Should I master whatever coding language I’m going to use before I try any of the tutorials? I tried the rolling ball tutorial and while I was able to get the ball to move, I was only able to do so by transcribing the code provided without actually understanding what any of it meant. It seems like the tutorials assume some past programming experience. Besides that, I’m currently thinking I might try to learn Javascript instead of C#, which everyone tells me is extremely difficult.

  2. I’ve never actually played much in the way of 2-D side-scrolling action-adventure before. Can you guys suggest any games I should play and study in order to get an idea for level design and mechanics work in these games?

  3. Finally, I’m planning to learn how to draw in order to do this project. Will any skills that I learn from pen and paper drawing still be useful when creating 2-d models for my game. Is there a huge learning-curve transferring from pen and paper drawing to digital drawing?

Thanks for reading this thread, its exciting to finally start something, and this seems like a great community to learn from!

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First I’d like to clarify that I’m also pretty new to Unity and learning lots of stuff and that my answers will be based on my experiences in the small amount of time I’ve used the engine and some advice given by the community.

  1. I don’t think you need to master the coding language you should use. I was able to make some fairly “decent” small games (by my low standards since I’m new) without any prior knowledge about C# and by just following through with tutorials. Of course, prior knowledge of the language will be very useful but it’s not necessary.

  2. I don’t actually play too many side-scrollers but I do watch a lot of videos about game design and some of those vids feature a side-scroller. I suggest the following youtube channels for game design. You can just look em up on youtube.
    1.Joseph Anderson
    2.thinreaper
    3.Mark Brown
    4.Snoman Gaming

  3. Extra Credits
    The following content creators make lots of videos about game design and critiques about popular video game pointing out their strengths and flaws.

  4. Not sure about this one. Don’t actually have much experience in drawing and 2d art.

Also, try to learn things one by one. It’ll allow you to focus better on your current project and make sure you aren’t stressed out by the amount of things you have to do/learn. Also, make sure to start small before you work on something complex.

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Look at @Iqew being the consistently helpful newbie! :stuck_out_tongue: Not at all bad advice, and I’ll echo your points on 1 and 2.

As far as art goes, I would imagine skills with drawing by hand and drawing digitally or almost directly transferrable 1:1. Composition, proportions, style… it’s all stuff that makes just as much sense in pixels as it does in… whatever pencil lead is measured in.

The thing drawing might not help you with is animation.While the principles are roughly the same as classic 2D animation like you’d find in old cartoons, how 2D models are animated can vary widely and will depend on the style you’re going for, whether it’s pixel art, keyframed animation, or rigged models. I’m far from an expert on that subject, and would advise you to use Google and YouTube to your advantage there as well for finding better qualified resources.

Anyhow, welcome to the forums, and good luck in your learning journey!

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Try the tutorials in the scripting section instead. They go through each of the principles of C# one at a time.

The complete projects give you a good general feel for the editor, but they aren’t a good place to learn code.

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Iqew has given you good advice, but I’d like to add my $0.02.

Absolutely not true at all! How about several weeks maybe two months max. But you will have to apply yourself, you get out what you put in.

I strongly encourage you to learn C# as it is the native scripting language in Unity. Nearly all examples you will find are in C#, and as long as you don’t have a background in either, go with C#. There are two distinct parts in programming, code syntax and logic flow. Code syntax is way easier to grasp as you can look it up in the documentation or refer to examples and those beloved error codes will keep you on the straight and narrow too. Logic flow requires you to break down any task into a sequence of individual tasks, where sequence order is critical. While you can read up on this, your tasks combined with the general structure of your game may and probably will create unique problems that you will have to work out on you own. A little experience and a lot of editing will get you there. It does become nearly trivial after a while.

If you’re good with pen, pencil, and brush, you probably have an understanding of art basics, scale, perspective, color, and shading. Those skills are transferable to digital art, but most artists feel a disconnect between themselves and the medium at first. One the other hand, you will find a boundless freedom and creative options in the digital space. Using replicate, scale, rotate, skew, stretch, distort, color, transparency, and the best of all, non destructive layers allow you so many options that simply are not available in non digital art.

Learning Unity and C# is very doable, but is not a walk in the park either. Add digital art 101 into the mix and I’m thinking that’s going to go into overload. Put Unity on hold for now, take a short free online course at learncs and get yourself acquainted with the image editor of your choice. After getting a little comfortable with both, then come back to Unity. Now with a little rudimentary experience in both coding and digital art, you can apply that to learning Unity.

Unity is a continual learning experience, you can become good, you can become great, but I don’t think anyone is a master of all Unity has to offer.

Happy coding and good luck to you.

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Other answers here are great. I’ll just add my $0.02 to this:

I don’t know who told you that, but they don’t know what they’re talking about. :slight_smile: C# is easier than Javascript (actually Unityscript in this case), because the compiler can provide more help catching dumb mistakes. Apart from this extra help, they are pretty much identical. You want that extra help, because you are going to make dumb mistakes at first.

On top of that, Unityscript is slowly going away; the community has converged on C# as the standard language, so that is certainly what I recommend you learn.

Welcome, and have fun!

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I missed the part where you said UnityScript. I would say don’t. C# is certianly the way to go.

I honestly preferred doing C# and Unity together, via the scripting page in the learn section.

A regular C# course will start off teaching you about the main method, then go through writing to the console, then getting input from the console. And so on, you won’t get to anything vaguely useful in Unity for days.

Start in the scripting section and you can get a cube spinning in your first lesson. In a couple of days you’ll know enough to build your own space invaders or flappy bird clone.

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Us newbs gotta look out for each other ya know :slight_smile:

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There are lot of problems which you can not solve through those tutorials. Learning c# or java depends on you but if you learn these languages they will help you in your near future

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Mastering a programming language is a lofty goal and will take years. I would recommend learning th basics of OOP AND C#. The hung about programmers languages is much of the work is done within a framework or a library associated with the language. The knowledge of the framwork or library is not generally transferable. For instance I know C++ as a language. I also know QT a C++ framework. The general knowledge I use every time I use the language. QT only applies when using QT. I would not delve too deep into C# for the sake of Unity learn enough to work with the Unity libraries and then become an expert in Unities implementing of C#.

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As a fellow newb, I’ll also add my $.02. It’s great that you’re pursuing your dream of making a game, I’m also pursuing that same goal.

Learning C# is not easy, and can seem very daunting, especially to us beginners. Keep at it though. The stuff that seemed impossible will be doable within a couple of months.

The help on this forum is amazing. If you can’t find your answer by doing your own diligent search, the people here step right up. Keep at it and I’m sure in the future you’ll be helping newbs. Good luck on your game.

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Another fellow noob (well, Since last january… so yeah, still a noob :wink: ), gonna throw in my 2p’s worth ← Yes, I’m british… don’t hate me, lol.

Everyone’s said quite a bit already, but just wanna give some advice about prototyping.

  1. Art can come later in a game. Just throw some stick figures (don’t even have to be animated for prototyping) in there as placeholder and just see if the core gameplay is fun or needs tweaking.

  2. If you need something a little more pleasing to the eye (but not necessarily ‘final product’ worthy) grab something from the asset store.

  3. If you’re keen on learning basic artwork then grab a cheap secnd hand pen & tablet if you can (I got one for £10-15), it has helped me no end for sketching out characters and stuff.

  4. When watching tutorials or reading tips pages, if you don’t understand some scripting or coding reference pause what you’re doing and quickly check it out. Even if you don’t use or understand it or use it straight away you will be building your knowledge - and don’t worry about your vids or articles, they should be there when you come back (having my browser never close tabs is a godsend for this).

Well, I’ve rambled on enough in a noobish manner, I’ll leave now :wink:

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Thanks everyone for being so helpful and welcoming!

I decided to take your guys’ advice and learn C#, thank you Bill Martini for the link to those tutorials, right now I’ve just been doing the tutorials up to while loops repeatedly until I can do it without thinking too hard.

The learning to draw part is actually the most difficult thing, my grasp of proportions and shapes is not the best. I’ll probably make a prototype out of stick figures like some of you suggested, but I hope I can eventually learn how to draw my own models, I don’t want to rely on what the Unity store has to offer.

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If you get very serious about game development, you will almost certainly hire or partner with an artist (or multiple artists). It’s possible for one person to do it all, but it’s quite difficult in most cases.

My boys and I did all the artwork for Rocket Plume, and I’m proud of how it came out, but we have received some criticism about the art quality. For High Frontier, we’ve hired professional artists for everything.

So, while I think everybody should learn to draw to at least a basic level — it’s a core skill, like being able to write or type — if it’s not where your passion lies, I would encourage you to not to worry about it too much.

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Don’t use the Unity-made tutorials! Brackeys has made an incredible absolute beginner set of tutorials here:

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Hey, Flappy Bird, Angry Birds and StickMan Golf were no works of art either. Don’t worry too much and best of luck!

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Out of curiosity, why?

Don’t get me wrong, Brackeys is good, as are severally other YouTubers. But that’s no reason to cut yourself off from the official tutorials.

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In addition to Brackey’s, Quill18Creates, GameGrind and Renaissance Coders are also good. For C# head over to The New Boston on YouTube.

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