So, I’ve been reflecting upon the time I spent watching videos on youtube on ‘how to code’ when I first started with unity… maybe about four years ago. I literally regret probably 70-80% of this time spent. So, I write this in hopes others may consider different routes. Before I get in to this, I am not at all saying these videos are not valuable resources. I am saying what you can obtain from them is limited and often, flawed.
Consider first the fact that these are free videos and anyone can put these out there as ‘curriculum’ - on top of the fact that when implemented a lot of these solutions do not function in full or at all, and unless you take the extra time to check their work - you could be under false assumptions. Meaning you spent time learning something you have to go back and google or re-learn in some shape or form.
So what am I suggesting? Use these videos to get an idea of what you want to do, maybe a general guide line of the direction to move - but do not base the actual logic of your games and/or projects on these videos as rarely are they production quality. Instead start off with -very- small projects, like tetris/frogger type games that require very little coding and can be accomplished quickly. Each time you finish one of these small projects you’ll be building your confidence in your ability to code while producing what you might call a code ‘tool-belt’ you can reference later for similar projects. Take each project step by step, break down each problem in to their basic components and google them. This has the benefit providing you with up to date information as well exposes you to the API.
So, in short, I wish I had spent a lot more time practicing than studying… <3
While I don’t necessarily agree with this, I did pretty much stick to Unity’s own video tutorials when I started since I figured that if they themselves didn’t know the best way to do things in their own engine, nobody else did. With Blender, I pretty much stick to CGCookie’s tutorials. I definitely think it’s worth going for quality from the beginning.
In general, my experience with random video tutorials on the internet, apart from being poorly presented, is that it seems like the tutors consider that anything is better than nothing, i.e., they’ll teach you to make something functional but kind of crappy and then be like “So now you’ve got the idea, you can do your own thing”.
While this can be ok sometimes, often you’re just beginning a project and while you know that you can just start ‘winging it’ and laying down some code, you’re looking for an overview of classic methods of implementation and a lot of tutorials will just waste your time here since the tutors are pretty much just doing it off the top of their heads.
But that said, what can you expect, good experienced people with teaching skills know what their time is worth and don’t have time to be creating free stuff for everybody.
For me a webpage would be ideal, you can scan through text way quicker and easier than you can video.
You can also quickly cut and past as needed.
Maybe with a few Gif’s or videos to show off what you end up with or how to configure things in the ide.
What we really need is a quality commercial game made in Unity that can be downloaded and is supported with documentation on how it was made, it’s design and game mechanic architecture.
One point on the small scale games made with Unity, they probably miss one of the key game development areas needed for larger games. Building your own toolchain within Unity for setting up and building the components in your game.
This is probably the most underrated thing, if I had to guess I’d say it’s one of the main reasons why people don’t finish games. Without a seriously customised workflow, all anyone can hope to make in a reasonable amount of time imo is a fairly simple little game, and waste a lot of time doing it. For approaching any game with a lot of content and a variety of complex interacting systems, such as a first-person rpg or something like that, Unity has to be customized to the point of being an ACME engine.
Not only Unity, but all the software in the development pipeline. I’ve spent more time learning to customise blender than I have unity, since that’s probably where most development time would be spent. I want them all working together to churn out junk like clockwork.
Books are good for abstract stuff such as code and syntax reference. But imo if you’re learning your way around an editor video is going to be hands down the best way to do it. At best a book would be littered with screen snaps, whereas a video can easily show twenty pages worth in a few seconds, not to mention showing how the screenshot was arrived at.
But there’s nothing quite like the feeling of having a book in your hands, I have to admit.
Before we go too far into this discussion we need to clarify something. Were you just watching the videos? Or were you repeating the steps on your end as the video progressed (naturally pausing and rewinding as necessary)?
There is a smorgasbord of crap out there that are just an hour of someone at a text editor, typing away, making errors most of the time, jumping around everywhere, and with zero production value. The best thing about them is that they can improve people’s self-esteem when they find tons of people who are as bad at programming as they are.
Compare them to the making stuff look good channel that a) has been produced, and b) is usually about shaders. So not only is the subject matter one that is vital to see in motion, it’s also packaged to be an easily consumable lesson. Even when it shows code, it just shows the complete (at that step) function.
That is a totally untrue statement right there. Don’t think you’re better than anyone else because you don’t watch videos.
I can bet your yearly game salary that there’s coders out there who did nothing but watch videos and can code an entire game 10 times better than you can.
To think you believe people are lazy because they watched someone do it makes you quite arrogant and the reason a lot of coders end up having a bad reputation for being the wanna be Top-Dawg at the office that give every coder the interpretation that we are all like that.
You have no arguments, only attacks ad personam. Being lazy is natual, it’s not an insult. Any “tutorial” is always for beginners, be it video or not. Everybody is a beginner at something. I’m a beginner 3D artist. I watched Blender tutorials on YT and learned a bit. I was simply brutally honest. It very often makes people feel bad.
I learned about laziness from an American: Brian Tracy. He says in his books that being lazy is neutral: it can be good or bad. It’s bad when you are slacking but It may be good when it motivates you to create innovations which save work, like game engines.
No, tutorials are not always for beginners. There are plenty of tutorials aimed at an intermediate and even advanced level. Just check to vast array of tutorials on Pluralsight.
It is really hard to see your use of the words “lazy” and “clueless” as anything less than an insult. If you meant differently, you really need to be more careful with what you are writing.
I would say it is good for beginners, but once you get to a certain point it is useless and the time is better spent trying your own approachs.
I still have to lookup a lot of information but it is mostly relating to math I am working with and it is mostly all text. Also the SIGGRAPH and GDC presentations you can find online are pretty good sources of proven information.
When I was a beginner I was afraid from reading text based tutorials, so i opted in for youtube tuts, but after a while I started using text based tutorials instead. And boy, is it so much better and faster. In my opinion, video based tutorials are so much more time wasting, because it includes alt-tabbing, waiting for the teacher to finish compiling the game, play it and then alt tab again and change more things, as well as needless explanations that could shown in comments, let alone replying to bug fixes. Because of this, i think text based tutorials are better, because it takes all the important bits of a video, and compresses it to text.
I kind of agree with this, but its also fear of not learning from text as well. So thats why they steer away from these. Ironically, text tutorials are way more straightforward and faster than a video :P.
It all comes down to what information is being taught. You can’t learn an software interface from a book in an efficient way. Imagine trying to learn the Blender interface from a book? When I watched a lot of Blender videos, if I lost track of the cursor for a second or missed a keystroke, I would be lost as to how to get to what I was looking at on the screen. A book would be a waste of time since it’s not as if the author is going to describe a series of keystrokes every time they talk about something. You’d be endlessly flipping around through the pages looking for the explanation for how to do something that the author presumes you know already.
Also imagine if you want to demonstrate anything dynamic such as gameplay in a book, again, impossible or horribly inefficient. Gameplay happens on a screen, and by far the best way to show it is on a screen.
Really I think the only thing that books do better, is when you’re dealing with small, abstract operations such as learning to code, that have nothing directly to do with gameplay, graphics or an interface of any kind.
Text tutorials are definitely faster then videos. More searchable too. However videos have a better chance of grounding someone who is completely new to the subject. A huge number of new Unity users follow the same pattern, starting with videos before moving on to text tutorials.
I would also suggest videos that don’t make you watch the tabbing or the compiling. There are plenty of well edited videos out there. Hint, hint, nudge, nudge, wink.
