Hello there! New to Unity, not to games design. Any advice for a newcomer?

Getting Started
1

If this is against the ToS I apologize profusely, just trying to get both an introduction topic for myself landed and also drop some feelers to what seems to be an excellent community on my journey to release.

My name is Glenn, and I’ve been a video game developer for about six years now. I’ve primarily worked in Cryengine and all of its future iterations, but certain changes in both their practices and software features has led me down the path of Unity. Myself and a team (Lead Artist, Programmer, Sound Designer, Composer, Voice Actors) all have two AAA mod (total conversions) under our belt in the Lovecraftian Horror genre and if you’d ever like to ask me about them, I’d be happy to. I just won’t link to them because I’m not trying to draw attention to that direction.

Let me profile my talents a little bit, and I’d like for you guys to recommend me tutorial series on how to advance my knowledge in my field to best contribute to a team? Foremost, in a game engine, I am a Director, Systems Designer, Level Designer. (Outside of these Unity specific fields I am also the only writer for my studio.) Essentially I would like to be able to skip programming languages, debugging/code slogs and be able to use the Unity tools to best hone my craft.

I’ve been at it for about two months now. I have my head wrapped around canvas, spatial construction of levels with assets and colliders, I get the timeline (It’s just like Trackview from Cryengine) and Animator and am pretty proficient at the UI elements so far. But one thing I miss is the ability to actually Games Design, since so much of that requires a substantial overhead on JS and C#. Are there any ways to bypass this? Let me paint an example.

In Cryengine if you want to interact with an object, you set up a ProximityTrigger (by physically just placing it in the space you want) with a wide enough radius. You attach a flowgraph that is drag/drop and says Start → Enable → PlayerEnter → EnableInputKeyOnce (Let’s say F is pressed) → ImageLoad True (Loads a custom book page, like Amnesia e.g) and EnableInputKeyOnce (F again) → ImageUnload True (Closes image.) Absolutely. Zero. Programming. Just lines with nodes.

Easy, right? I can’t even begin to do something that simple in Unity, and it’s all on my programmer right now. As far as I know virtually nothing like that exists on a Designer front in Unity, yeah? The best I can do is wrap my head around “void OnTriggerStay2D(Collider2D other)” and attaching if functions below it. But that, my friends, is the best I can do.

So if you guys have any tutorial series, easy to understand FAQ’s for me, or just general advice on where to build up my inventory, I would appreciate it so much. I’ve read a lot of documentation, but having a compass or gameplan makes it so much easier to learn for me.

2

If you’re looking for something that runs akin to flowgraphs and (if you’re familiar) blueprints in UE4, you’ll probably want to use something like Playmaker. It’s the best selling visual scripting solution on the Asset Store for good reason, and has plenty of support and documentation. It also has loads of tutorials both from the creator and from other users.

2 Likes
3

That looks and sounds awesome. Would it be applicable to a strictly 2D game as well? So things like area triggers, dialog boxes, diary pages, inventory screens etc could be done easily by me between Playmaker, Canvas, and other visual systems? I have a Programmer who can fill in the blanks at times, but I just want to be able to contribute in the Games Design field without learning an entire language and holding things up.

4

Yep, there are hooks to just about anything Unity has to offer and it’s extensible with custom actions, so if you need something really specific, your programmer can probably whip one up for you.

5

Do you happen to know off the top of your head how it works? Only two of us work in Unity itself as a program, the other guy to program and me to design or integrate the assets made out of unity. If I buy Playmaker and colab to the project with any of those elements, would it require two license purchases even if he uses Unity (with them installed) but doesn’t use or manipulate them?

6

PlayMaker is one licence per seat, yes. I’ve accumulated three of them over time because they’ve handed them out like Halloween treats. You get it on sale fairly often, and with different bundles from the Unity Plus/Pro subscriptions or whatever they think of next.

Note that PlayMaker is a state machine with triggers, events and actions. I find that it’s more agreeable to designer types than programmers, but it can be useful for setting up dialog/quest/mission systems which the whole team can understand. HearthStone uses it, and I can see why. A visual state machine makes things much easier when designing a turn-based card game.

This is the easiest system for a non-programmer to understand, and a programmer can extend it with new functionality specific to their needs.

Two different beasts are uScript and FlowCanvas. I have uScript, but FC is similar: Node-based free-flow programming instead of state machines. People with electronics building experience take to these more easily than others. Understanding programming logic is still very useful.

Building a state machine with either means combining a few nodes, but you also get more granular control over the whole thing. A programmer can also build nodes and expose them to this system, to pack in more functionality in fewer components. As an example I made an input system which can be easily wired to a GUI, supporting various specific gamepads.

I’m pretty sure these last two tools are closer to Blueprints than PlayMaker too, but I have little knowledge of UE specifics. I recommend watching tutorial videos for all three systems, and also checking out similar assets on the store.

7

The key to getting non programmers doing useful stuff in Unity is to use and abuse the inspector. Your programmer can build fairly generic components that expose a bunch of stuff to the inspector. Then the designers can hook these up to actually do things.

Check out UnityEvents as well, these let you wire things up with extreme flexibility in the inspector.

8

This video is pretty much - you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuSVX4ji0jU

And here is the supporting presentation.

1 Like