While I’m not a complete stranger to Unity or coding itself I generally consider myself being really bad in Unity, and I wish to improve. Of course, naturally I would just go and ask community for good quality Unity tutorials without explaining what’s my goal and what kind of games I wish I could make down the road in 3-4 years, since learning Unity isn’t really that easy but nor is it complex.
Ok, so here’s my question to you. What tutorials would you suggest me to watch (paid or free) in order to better grasp the semantics and logic of Unity and complex game making itself. I know that there’s a lot of tutorials on internet about every field of Unity (C# coding, shaders, sound, physics, inventory system, UI/GUI, mecha animation, fps games, RPG’s etc.) But I wanna know as much as possible in order to make games that are similar to most FPS RPG’s like Fallout 4 for example as a one man team.
I just want to inform you guys that I already have experience and skills in 3D modeling, texturing, animation and rigging of course so I won’t be reliant too much on Unity Asset store except for the sounds, music and occasional shaders. Note, that I don’t consider using assets and tools from Unity Store a good practice and hence I want to be a game developer that will be good in pretty much everything except for the shaders because I heard those things were a nightmare to learn. I guess I’m wishing for too much at this point.
So yeah, in conclusion. I just want a set of tutorials that are not generic and will not waste my time. I do realize Brackey’s, Xenomash games and other Unity Youtuber’s are a great source for learning but I want to know more and I guess you can find those on Udemy but question is, which ones are the most informative, intuitive and easy to follow. Sorry for posting like the 100th version thread about asking tutorials for Unity but each year a new set of tutorials are released and the old ones are with outdated code.
Truthfully once you’ve progressed beyond the basics there aren’t very many tutorials of any real value. What you need to progress beyond the basics is a skill that is almost never taught by the tutorials. You need to learn problem solving.
Breaking a complex problem down into a simpler problem is the key to building complex games and tutorials almost never step you through this process. They almost always just tell you the steps you need to achieve it without explaining how they came up with the steps in the first place.
Instead of looking for more complex tutorials my advice is to simply start building games. Start with simple games (single mechanic) and slowly progress to more and more complex games. Ideally watch people play your game or at least have them comment on the things they did and didn’t like about it. Finishing and releasing a few would be a plus too.
To some degree I agree with you on that. However, why would you want to reinvent the wheel? Sorry If I wasn’t being clear on what I’m looking for, but I do realize there is no Learn Everything about Unity tutorial. All I was looking for was the most information worthy tutorials on Unity, if there are any. It’s really difficult for me to explain what exactly I am looking for and not to sound like a tutorial dependent diva.
Jesus Christ, there have to be tutorials out there who in total have 100+ hours content in them and after you watch you’re like… ." Ok, I’ve seen enough I no longer have the desire to watch anymore tutorials relating to Unity… they make me sick and I want some challenge for a change. Time to start building my own game and have fun debugging it and going around some technical issues."
I could link you to some YouTube stuff, but it sounds like you’ve already slogged through that. At this stage, you need to start shoring up your weak points. If you’re not comfortable in C and shader language you should probably start here:
I don’t know how up-to-date those links are, but it should be a good start. You’re also going to need to put some serious, real effort, time into learning game design. Search Amazon for reviews on this topic, buy the books from ebay. These are not Unity specific, but it’s crucial. Watching game tear-downs and Ludum Dare post mortoms is a great way to get your feet into it.
Also, as mentioned above. Start making games. Just do it. In the course of problem shooting (you’re going to do that allot) you are going to look up lots of answers and realize problems that your could have never imagined. Participate in lots and lots of game jams.
If your programming is even slightly weak, you’re going to need to take a really solid programming course. Forget Unity, I suggest C++ but to each their own. You need to understand the paradigms of OOP, what a “type” is, and various other important structures. Go to Udemy and find a C++ course and make sure to do the excersizes.
Also, Coursera has a course called “building tetris from scratch”. Take that.
Addressing your issue with outdated code. If you’re past the beginner stages and moving into intermediate/advanced Unity use, outdated code should not be an issue in a tutorial. If you want to be a programmer, you need to be a problem solver. You need to them use that opportunity to find out WHY it isn’t working.
To understand why and how the wheel works. One major disadvantage with resources like tutorials and the Asset Store is that the wheels they provide won’t always perfectly fit your needs and without a proper understanding of how they function under the hood you won’t be able to make the necessary adjustments for them to fit your project.
Yoo, guys. Ok, I see that I have messed up with constructing my questions and requests. So here it is again.
I’m not much of a stranger to Unity and codding I only know the basics for making a Roll a Ball game. I still lack a lot of knowledge in other technical and code wise aspects of Unity. I have only seen glimpse of tutorials on Udemy and Youtube and what they could potentially offer but I’m not too sure which ones should I watch. I don’t want to waste my time watching tutorials that are repetitive, long and uninformative. So I would appreciate if someone who has years of experience in both making games in Unity and watching tutorials to point me out chronologically to tutorials I should watch in order to gain much knowledge as quickly as possible (we’re talking about years here) in order to become self reliant game maker. I’ve seen a lot of 30+ hour courses that are pretty much copy’s of each other or at least I think they are I’ve never went through them except haw way through the “Udemy - The Complete Unity Developer” from which I would have to say that it’s most useful for building 2D platforms and etc. but not for FPS and TPS which I don’t mind since the course is really still useful especially with it’s UI text games but I could be wrong since I still haven’t through the whole course.
The free c# class in Sololearn helped me understand coding in unity immensely. The problem I had with the unity tutorials is it’s pretty tough to separate which language is Unity-specific and which language is native to c#. So the sololearn course helped me learn the grammar, and then going back to unity tutorials from that is helping me learn the vocabulary.
Game Programming Patterns, while not specific to c#, explains the ‘architecture’ of game coding and a lot of the concepts that it explains are integrated into unity’s design, and I’ve been finding it to be pretty edifying to help learn how to think like a programmer, too.
I feel like you’ve guys have already given me a substantial amount of resources to work with but I also think I should wait for more answers and different opinions before I dive in into educating myself more about Unity.
The right time to start learning is always “now”. Don’t wait for that “perfect advice” leading you to the golden learning path of knowledge, it won’t come.
Imho the fastest way to learn is reading the official manual and scripting reference, and watching GDC talks on the side (you can usually follow such talks while doing some light gaming on a second screen).
Just like anything most of what you’ve wrote is true to an extent and is subjected to ones subjective point of view. I should inform you that I have already started learning Unity 4 moths ago gradually and have made a small prototype game with custom objects made in 3rd party software such as Blender.
I can angry on reading the official Unity manual with no problem whatsoever, however when talking about combining “light” gaming with following a lecture that I can not simply agree to a slightest degree unless you have some-kind of never before seen disability that prevents you from focusing on one thing at a time and the only way to study is to preoccupy one part of your brain with mindless gaming while you’re studying a particular topic. Sorry, I don’t want to sound like a jack-ass but It frustrates me slightly when people say that playing games and studying go hand in hand.
Whatever works for you! I’ve had problems in the past of literally falling asleep when watching tutorial videos on painting, like those from Gnomon. CGP Grey and Myke Hurley talked about this topic in an episode of their cortex podcast and apparently there really are some people who can pay attention better when they engage some part of their brain with a light activity while listening to something unrelated. I’m sure there are also people to whom it is purely detrimental. You need to find out to what group you belong yourself.
Here is one of my favorite GDC talks to get you started:
This one covers something that I also consider to be really important and often overlooked by beginners:
I also like some of the Extra Credits episodes as “food for thought”. Though they never really go in-depth enough to really teach you specific things and some people really dislike them for that reason. But I think like someone here once said, “they can be part of a well-balanced gamedev video diet”. I just wouldn’t rely on them alone. Diversify!
I have tried so many tutorials and just watching video tutorials really does not work for me to retain the information.I tried to find tutorials and went through all the Unity Learn tutorials. What I started doing is to first think of what game I wanted to make. From there I started to break down that game in categories in tasks. I don’t come from a programming background, so everything is brand to me. Been working on a project for 7 months now and I have learned so much by tinkering and researching how to do simple things which add up to a complex subject (clamping and moving a first person camera attached to the head of a 3d character). I have also been trying to gradually learn Unity from a hobbyist perspective and not rush the learning process.
I am stuck on one sentence.
“So yeah, in conclusion. I just want a set of tutorials that are not generic and will not waste my time”
Generic tutorials are the best. You get a generic tutorial about raycasting, you can raycast anything. A specific tutorial is like buying a prefab that you don’t know how to modify.
I think OP might mean that generic tutorials about gamemaking will always have overlap in what they teach and it becomes a huge waste of time to hear lengthy explanations about redundant topics from different people when you go through tutorials aimed at similar audiences. I think the answer to that isn’t on the specific/generic axis of tutorials, it’s on the side of watching many unrelated tutorials vs. watching one very lengthy and streamlined curriculum in video form, that is designed to avoid that redundancy of information to a higher degree.
I still think RTFM is the way to go here.
I like rtfm, and see where your getting at, but redundancy in tutorials is just strengthening fundamentals. I hear something once, I think “I know how to do it”, but when I hear something twice, I think “I know why I do it”.
I’ve never minded learning something more than once. There are always different angles that make you understand more even if you can reliably regurgitate something you saw once. If you see it twice, you start understanding what causes the regurgitation.
The learn section is really excellent. You can be deceived by thinking, I don’t want to make that kind of game, but the practices he uses change your mind pretty fast. I’m doing the 2d roque tutorial or something to that effect, and he goes into using generic functions, creating random levels, singletons, coroutines, etc. He goes at just the right speed and gives just enough explanation so you understand it. I don’t have any plans to make a 2d game, but that really doesn’t matter.
Ok, so I think I’ve got enough information on where I should head with learning or “mastering” skills in Unity. The manual that you people mention must be of utmost importance and it’s likely exactly what I was looking for but I just didn’t know it at the time. However, aside from the manual I will also look into some of the Unity Youtubers you guys have mentioned and also probably 1 or 2 of very long but educational courses on Udemy.
And before I go. Yes, @Martin_H you have more or less pin-pointed the explanation of what I was thinking when I was referring to paid full-length courses/tutorials. I think that most of the courses that you could find on Unity from different authors are copies of each other in the codding sense. They generally teach you the same thing through out making their 2D or 3D games but each course is unique to itself because they more or less have different approaches or methods to solving the same problem. However, what I was hopping to find is course that would contain the most amount of information or would cover pretty much everything there is to know about Unity and that it would easily transfer all that given knowledge as a skill to the user or student in such way that the student wouldn’t feel nor have the need to endlessly watch long tutorials or courses in hopes of finding more useful information because he would have confidence, skill and experience to either solve, figure out a problem on his own or by reading with ease complex explanations given by more experienced Unity users and professionals.
Ok, so I’m not going to edit my last comment just to show the community how inconsiderate, ungrateful and forgetful sometimes I could be. I forgot to say thanks for all the time you guys took of your hands in order to help a struggling user of the magnificent Unity engine. So yeah… thank you for all the help and sorry for not doing this sooner people. I hope one day that I will be able to return the favor to the community.
