Hello. So I was playing with unity for a while. I followed a lot of tutorials and now I understand basics of unity and C sharp.
What should I do next? Is it better for me to put unity away and learn C sharp and then come back, or I should only code in unity? Should I go to youtube, or look for text based tutorials?
If I spend 2 hours a day to learn how to write code, how long you think it will take me to learn how to wrtite code for entire 2D sidescroller game on my own?
Thank you for your time reading and answering to this post!
That’s a really hard question for anybody to answer. We don’t know how much previous programming experience you have, whether you already tend to think clearly & logically, how motivated you are, etc.
But if you want a WAG (wild-ass guess) anyway, at 2 hours a day, I would think you could write your own sidescroller within a few months or so.
As for what to do next: given what you’ve already done, and that you understand the basics, I don’t see any advantage in putting Unity aside to study C# on its own. Instead, just keep working on Unity. Divide your 2 hours a day between doing more tutorials, and hacking on your own project. And whenever you get stuck, post here.
(You may find that coding isn’t the biggest part of creating a side-scroller… especially once you learn to embrace Unity events, for example.)
Hi and thank you for quick response.
Sadly I don’t have any previous coding knowledge at all.
I’m 25 years old, so I’m taking this seriously.
I’m already writing simple things myself with help of unity documentation, when I get stuck I go to unity irc chat, there are always someone who helps me out. But I understand that I’m far away from achieving what I really need.
I will look and experiment with Unity events tomorrow, thank you very much!
I was thinking about few months as well.
I managed to get to a comfortable level in Unity after a 2-day boot camp course offered by the company I worked for at the time. Within a month I had released 2 VR experiences to the public.
I do have programming experience, though it has been years since I’ve actually worked as a programmer. I also work as a game developer at a major studio so I certainly didn’t come to it as a complete beginner. I’d say the previous estimates of a few months is accurate, depending on your dedication, and could be improved with some good tutorials.
I will say that Unity’s tools are substantially more user friendly and intuitive than what we actually use in the industry, so working in Unity was a breath of fresh air for me. It is being increasingly embraced as a prototyping tool at major studios as it is generally quicker to get new design concepts and mechanics up and running than with in house tools.
It took me a day from downloading the editor to having my first flappy bird clone built. I had no formal training in programming, but a pretty solid grounding in mathematics and logic from my engineering degree.
With no experience at all its still possible to follow a tutorial and have a game built in a couple of days. Give yourself a couple of months with the learn section and you should be able to produce simple original games on your own.
I’d suggest that (especially with the GGJ) you participate and find a location with other people doing the jam. If not, you can run it from home, but the reason I want to suggest these, is you can sit with other people and try to make a game and learn from the people around you and it might be fun as well.
I wouldn’t recommend putting unity away - it gets updated pretty often - if you got the hang of C# - I recommend studying both the API documentation for Unity and .Net in detail - as well as an other cross platform libraries you might want to use…
Ok so maybe Unity doesn’t get updated as often as we would like - but when it does - there Is often a lot to take in…
If you are up for intense challenges - take a look at shader language - if you would just like to kick back at a more reasonable pace - then yeah ludumdare or even gamejams (both personal and competitive) are a great way to build your skills…
Keep in mind for larger projects making your code legible and easy to read is a big part of coding team work - nobody wants to delve into obfuscated code; keep what you write now - and in months to come look back at it - and you will probably see it might be a bit messy (idk honestly you may have great style truly) - but I tend to find with people who just start coding - they don’t understand things which really help in a team - like giving variables meaningful names which are also the minimum amount of characters possible to ensure the reader knows what the code is doing, when you use something like
void Method(int p)
{
for (int I=0;i<10;i++)
for (int o=0;o<10;o++)
p++;
}
it can be confusing for example to tell that p is a value that is supplied to the method and not an iterator itself; this is especially true if the loops are not even on the same screen as the method declaration.
Its the little things like this combined with your overall coding strategy that will make the difference between a beginner and an intermediate/advanced coder…
I’ve read a few books about it - they all tend to agree - good code should just read and flow fluidly - so your eyes can just glide through it - and you know what things do - sometimes you have to put comments - but more often the code itself should tell the story…