hey all,
does anyone know where to find smaller bite sized untiy tutorials? The big ones are a bit terrifying.
thanks,
cp
try here
there’s also an old tuts just can’t find it yet
I have to admit the 3rd Person Platformer tutorial is rather daunting… I’ve never finished it myself and I helped create it 
Out of curiosity, what would make a useful, and smaller, tutorial for you as an artist and new user? What are the immediate issues you’re facing as you started using Unity that the documentation either isn’t covering or is too confusing to wrap your head around without step-by-step guidance? I’m asking as a fellow artist that can see from your portfolio that you obviously know what you’re doing from the content creation side. Are you looking for more basic/concise scripting tutorials or for general, “how do I put everything (assets, scripts, etc…) together to make a game” type tutorials?
Ethan
@aNTeNNa trEE
I tell you the biggest one for me when i started was that it didn’t say anywhere ( or any where I read ) that javascript was .NET. It was many questions later that I found that out in this forum, then a good few more before I found out it was actually MONO and then a good deal of googling to find out what MONO was.
I have a small amount of coding experience but not enough to just guess at all the above.
@hula
Have you tried these
I know they say they are for flash to unity but I think for bite sized tuts they are very useful for anyone.
Are those little PDF-tutorials still coming with Unity? I remember doing that marble-tutorial and found it a pretty good way to start getting into Unity.
Personally, I did complete the 3D Platform Tutorial and really enjoyed it (except the “issues” I found that I had posted to the forums and bug reported back then).
I agree that the “script development technology” of Unity being Mono should be made more transparent. Personally, I found Unity because I was looking for an engine that supported .NET or Mono (so I actually came through the mono-project site). However, someone who’s not looking for that might have a significantly harder time.
Also, I think that Unity’s scripting being based on Mono - which means it’s basically .NET - should be a pretty strong “point” from the marketing perspective (just make sure people don’t think this has anything to do with XNA!)
Space Invaders as a Colision example.
Sammual
I think one of each major gameplay samples would help a lot:
- FPS (weapons change, score, lives, ammo management, multiplayer)
- Racing (collision detection, car physics, timer)
- RTS (3rd person view, multiple unit selection, resource management)
- RPG (dialogs, inventory management, particle effects for spells, persistent characters, multiplayer)
- Puzzle (logic )
- Arcade scrollers (vertical or horizontal)
- Flying/space (controls, physics, ships, weapons and ammo management).
They can be simple one level samples or game templates. All non-coders would appreciate that. I used Multimedia Fusion in the past to create simple desktop games and they had some game samples that helped me to start.
@ mobo13
All excellent suggestions! The next question would be if these types of scenarios need to be step-by-step tutorials or if demos that exemplified these scenarios would be enough… the latter of course takes a lot less time for us. Would people like to see 10 demos that show examples of these scenarios or 1 or 2 thorough tutorials that go into a couple of topics in depth? Is there a tutorial that could cover all bases for people? What would that be? A 3rd person shooter where your character jumps into a vehicle to race to the finish line while going into 2D isometric top down combat with multiplayer RTS elements where you have to solve point-and-click puzzles to make progress against your online friends while leveling up?
I vote for the separate demos, but I really want to hear what everyone has to say on this as it is something we’re thinking about.
Ethan
Those types of gameplay type examples would be a very nice addition. Full fledged tutorials aren’t really needed as between the 3d platformer and Will’s tutorials the Unity workflow is covered very nicely.
However please make them bare bones and minimalist in nature. If you look at things like the Vehicle and Networking examples, they tended to be somewhat bloated and as such make it difficult to figure out the bits you need.
I would also vote for the separate demos especially the RPG one as that is the one I have the most focus on right now.
Thanks
Personally, I think for new users, tutorials are much better than demos. However, it’s easy to see that creating tutorials takes significantly more time than creating demos.
Also, demos can be used as templates for new projects, which is nice … but … new users might be a little overwhelmed and then get frustrated (most of the demos - to be complete - would be pretty large and somewhat complex projects even if you keep it simple; from a new user’s eyes, at least ).
So maybe we can start with demos and supplement that with some of the existing tutorials. Or some volunteers might even create tutorials from the demos
I also vote for the separate demos.
One big game with all of the possible gameplays included would be overwhelming and confusing for beginners. Separate small demos with detailed commentary (what exactly this piece of code does) should be just enough. No tutorial needed (but welcomed…:)). I am thinking more of a “release notes” - what else needs to be done…remember to create collision boxes, attach sounds, scripts, lights, rigidbody, animations, etc…
Each small game template should cover all the major gameplay elements for this type of games, though.
I went through 2D and 3D tutorials pretty quick. I must say those are VERY GOOD tutorials…probably THE best tutorials I went through in a long time. Very detailed and easy to read and follow. To create similar tutorials for mentioned game templates will take looong time. I also think it would be rudimentary in most cases since all the basics are already covered in the existent tutorials.
Basically, we need “How do I…?” kindda samples (it seems like this is THE most frequently asked question). I think Unity3D owners and owners-to-be will provide plenty ideas in this department. It would make sense to create a separate forum topic just for that.
Ditto.
I would LOVE to see one demo per game type that is am small and simple as you can make it without missing any basic feature. Keep the scripts simple and well documented and if people want they can add on to these demos to make thier games. If a game type gets popular enough users can write tutorials on how to add more advanced fetures to these demos.
I would like to see the Unity company Tutorials to focus on a single topic not a whole game. That way they will be smaller and more easily digested.
Sammual
Almost forgot…a fighting game template!
Some of the old tutorials are quite nice, and it’s a great idea to have small demos of a bunch of different genres. One of the biggest mistakes a user can make is to jump into Unity thinking that even Space Invaders is going to be the first thing you make. A demo where you’re given a collection of not overly complicated scripts (say, a 1st-person walker, a mouse-picker, a collision effect based on tags or likewise, or a camera controller) and a html or PDF doc that dissects the script and how to use it in a scene would be helpful and a good intro to the Unity API, which is my impression of what most people need. A good number of the existing demos have, as Sammual and mobo13 pointed out, complex relationships between scripts and GameObjects that often don’t make much sense without a lot of prodding and pre-existing knowledge of how Unity works. Even if you have programming experience, jumping into a new language/API can be daunting, and a thorough dissection of a couple exemplary scripts that show how to use Transforms, Components, and how the message system works would have been very welcome when I started with Unity.
The demo’s with 1 or 2 in depth tutorials would get my vote 
Demos will be a great deal of help to get a noob unity users to get started on a project.
this will actually motivate people to jump into unity without any hesitation, instead of asking question like: “is unity3d right for me?”
new unity prospects all they have to do is look at the demo start up kits and realize their project will be easily doable in unity with a little bit of jump start with the demo.
Some sort of starter kit with basics of each one of the game genres or at least most popular ones.
by browsing thru the forum since i was more interested on the rpg side, found this link for an rpg project here on unity forums back in 2005:
http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=132&highlight=rpg+project
great idea but unfortunately the project lasted for 10 days. no future, the thread ended up dead for the past 4 years and it may probably will for the next 4 years more to come.
Anyways I will love to see start up kits demos.
hope this thoughts wont end up like the rpg project stated above “dead”
regards
An updated fps tutorial or demo would be sweet.