Hi there,
I’ve been working in Unity for about six months now, and I’ve followed tons of tutorials and I have the capabilities to sit down and make a basic game with Unity’s basic tools. What I want to know is how do I begin to really develop my abilities within and outside of Unity?
Where can I learn more efficient ways of scripting? And the complexities that it involves?
Where can I learn to make a game world rather than placing boxes and terrain? Where can I learn more advanced techniques that are going to expand what I am capable of beyond that scope of what I realize I can do?
Start with a small game, and build it. Make sure it includes everything you expect a game to have. When you’re done, pick another game that’s slightly more complex and do it again.
If something particularly takes your interest as something to learn about, select designs which incorporate that thing.
There’s no one path to learning all of game development. Most developers pick an area to specialise in and just start building up experience in that area. Broadly, learning problem solving techniques and building up knowledge and experience to kickstart your problem solving is what makes you “good”. Nobody can know it all, but you don’t have to.
No, just more people who know better to jump in and offer thorough corrections.If you correct a bad answer, you’ve helped a lot more than just one person.
I’m with Kiwasi’s advice – I purposefully try to answer questions especially if I am not 100% about the answer because if you give a poor answer nothing riles people up more and then you’ll get healthy peer review. It is a great way to test out your ideas against the community. Just don’t be a baby about criticisms.
What is not useful is one self-avowed expert saying “this is the way!” and nobody challenging it.
Anyway, what I wanted to add for the OP is : start breaking things and recognize the value of failures and mistakes. This is the most thorough way to learn. As others said, just start working, even if you feel totally lost. Every mistake you make and learn from is a big step forward, even if you feel like you’re stuck in a pit.
On the same idea as above, the best way to learn is by solving problems. Tutorials can help, but you won’t really learn from them. You need to have a problem you are trying to solve on your own. You need to try, you need to fail, and you need to try again. Eventually you will resolve the problem and understand everything around it far better than anyone could ever explain it to you. Partly this is because after you solve the problem yourself you will not just understand “how” but “why” as well.
Well I always recommend devouring ALL of the learning content you can find. But the thing is, it’s only partially useful if you haven’t done the work first. Like, if somebody is explaining how some tools work or how to work around some problem, it’s only like 50% useful if you haven’t encountered the need for the tools first or encountered the specific problem they are proposing a solution for first.
So I find the most thorough approach is : jump in and do the work until you hit a wall. Search solutions to your problem. Most likely, as a beginner, it’s very common and thus no sense not using common solutions freely available. Continue. Doing the work and practciing self-sufficiency is not antithetical to using generational knowledge and “climbing on the shoulders of giants.”
Eventually you have fewer and fewer problems, but when you do there won’t be an easily searchable solution. But by then, you have a pretty good mental library and also you understand how things work behind the curtains, so troubleshooting isn’t a big thing.
ahem, the key to proper development is to first spin around in a circle very fast for 3 minutes. This gets your brain phalanges in the right order for serious thinkerings.
Its better to reserve stackexchange etc to the seniors in my opinion. There are better ways of learning to write code than to pollute question and answer communities with junk
Some like your inadequate advices to OPs from the past?
Sorry, by I don’t agree. It is easy to fall that way in only dinosaurs views. And we know technology evolves, so fresh and more adequate to skill answers are required.
Seniors are not guaranteed for knowledge of ‘correct’ solutions.
However, I am not pointing at correctness, or fault of stack overflow system itself. Is not ideal, but is functional.
We all got some analytical and judgment skills. That should allow us to read beyond, what is considered as ‘right way’, to learn about different angles.
We know. You have said this on literally every single thread he posts on. The interaction between you two is becoming quite toxic.
For your own mental health, and the peace of everyone else, put him on your ignore list. Its a relatively easy process. Just click his profile pic, then click ignore.
In my book, and I push this as a manager too: seniority isn’t based on knowledge (above the minimal amount of course), anyone can sit down and grind through all the nowadays popular frameworks, patterns and methods. Seniority shows how much you are willing to do to obtain more knowledge and how quickly you know where to go and what to read to obtain the correct minimal information to solve the problem. Apparently these companies I’m working for and with agree with it. And I’m not an advisor who comes and goes and has no stake in the game.
Stackoverflow is a good place to find answers to questions you’ll end up asking.