Hi. I am making a game where you take care of little aliens and I want to have the ability to pet them. I don’t know where to start, maybe you do?
This is a great way to get started: keep asking yourself “Can I …?”
Imphenzia: How Did I Learn To Make Games:
Tutorials and example code are great, but keep this in mind to maximize your success and minimize your frustration:
How to do tutorials properly, two (2) simple steps to success:
Step 1. Follow the tutorial and do every single step of the tutorial 100% precisely the way it is shown. Even the slightest deviation (even a single character!) generally ends in disaster. That’s how software engineering works. Every step must be taken, every single letter must be spelled, capitalized, punctuated and spaced (or not spaced) properly, literally NOTHING can be omitted or skipped.
Fortunately this is the easiest part to get right: Be a robot. Don’t make any mistakes.
BE PERFECT IN EVERYTHING YOU DO HERE!!
If you get any errors, learn how to read the error code and fix your error. Google is your friend here. Do NOT continue until you fix your error. Your error will probably be somewhere near the parenthesis numbers (line and character position) in the file. It is almost CERTAINLY your typo causing the error, so look again and fix it.
Step 2. Go back and work through every part of the tutorial again, and this time explain it to your doggie. See how I am doing that in my avatar picture? If you have no dog, explain it to your house plant. If you are unable to explain any part of it, STOP. DO NOT PROCEED. Now go learn how that part works. Read the documentation on the functions involved. Go back to the tutorial and try to figure out WHY they did that. This is the part that takes a LOT of time when you are new. It might take days or weeks to work through a single 5-minute tutorial. Stick with it. You will learn.
Step 2 is the part everybody seems to miss. Without Step 2 you are simply a code-typing monkey and outside of the specific tutorial you did, you will be completely lost. If you want to learn, you MUST do Step 2.
Of course, all this presupposes no errors in the tutorial. For certain tutorial makers (like Unity, Brackeys, Imphenzia, Sebastian Lague) this is usually the case. For some other less-well-known content creators, this is less true. Read the comments on the video: did anyone have issues like you did? If there’s an error, you will NEVER be the first guy to find it.
Beyond that, Step 3, 4, 5 and 6 become easy because you already understand!
Finally, when you have errors, don’t post here… just go fix your errors! Here’s how:
Remember: NOBODY here memorizes error codes. That’s not a thing. The error code is absolutely the least useful part of the error. It serves no purpose at all. Forget the error code. Put it out of your mind.
The complete error message contains everything you need to know to fix the error yourself.
The important parts of the error message are:
- the description of the error itself (google this; you are NEVER the first one!)
- the file it occurred in (critical!)
- the line number and character position (the two numbers in parentheses)
- also possibly useful is the stack trace (all the lines of text in the lower console window)
Always start with the FIRST error in the console window, as sometimes that error causes or compounds some or all of the subsequent errors. Often the error will be immediately prior to the indicated line, so make sure to check there as well.
Look in the documentation. Every API you attempt to use is probably documented somewhere. Are you using it correctly? Are you spelling it correctly? Are you structuring the syntax correctly? Look for examples!
All of that information is in the actual error message and you must pay attention to it. Learn how to identify it instantly so you don’t have to stop your progress and fiddle around with the forum.
There are no other tutorials. I wouldn’t be writing here for nothing
Oh come on, at a minimum get an alien walking around.
Make it a box. Make it move. Put a button on it that does something when you click it.
If you do that you are 99% of the way there.
The purpose of this forum is to assist people who are ready to learn by doing, and who are unafraid to get their hands dirty learning how to code, particularly in the context of Unity3D.
This assumes you have at least written and studied some code and have run into some kind of issue.
If you haven’t even started yet, go check out some Youtube videos for whatever game design you have in mind. There are already many examples of the individual parts and concepts involved, as there is nothing truly new under the sun.
If you just want someone to do it for you, you need go to one of these places:
https://livehelp.unity.com/?keywords=&page=1&searchTypes=lessons
Remember this is YOUR game, not ours. We have our own games we’re working on.
I mean tutorials should be for the purpose of learning to use a specific part of the engine, or for making games in general. There are countless kinds of games out there that you’ll have very little help in making in the form of tutorials. That’s just part of game dev; problem solving.
But pretty much what Kurt said. Break down your goal into smaller problems. Look at how to solve each one in isolation. More often something like “pet an animal” needs to be broken down into more abstract developer concepts such as “read input when near an animal” and “play an animation” afterwards.
Though what specific flavour of “pet an animal” you’re talking about is unknown as there’s a thousand different ways that could be interpreted.
Well you’ve explained next-to-nothing about your game so how are we supposed to help?
There is no need for explaining. I just need to be able to pet a character.
Right, but are we talking like, wiggle your cursor on top of a virtual animal to pet it? Or are we talking walking your player up to an animal to press a button to pet it? Or some other flavour?
There’s too many unknowns here. We can’t advise, we’d be shooting in the dark.
Yeah, so I want the cursor to go from left to right and for the alien to recognize it’s being pet. That is all
That would be gesture recognition. Google reports 9.1 million results. GO! Get busy. The alien won’t recognize itself.
Alternately, here was my own nod-head-YES and shake-head-NO gesture recognizer. Same idea but with gaze rotations rather than positions.
Closed. Low effort.
1 Like