Lately, when I browse Unity answers or the forums there’s something on my mind: I feel I’m no longer getting much value out of the community myself ever since I’ve passed the “newbie” stage. I try to answer questions others have, but I feel like most of them are either of such low quality, that I can’t even care to put in effort or they are duplicates of questions asked a hundred times before. Not to say I wouldn’t encourage new users. I really enjoy teaching people at school and like an active and beginner-friendly community. But when it comes to my personal questions or research, I feel totally drowned out by the amount of trivial topics. It might be that my questions are too vague or peculiar to be discussed online, but I also feel like there are only 10 community members who use Unity professionally, have some kind of programming background or just generally share expert knowledge; and most of those people are moderators or Unity employees. Does anybody else feel that way?
Where can I find resources which go beyond beginner tutorials, answers and trivial topics? I know of maybe 3 Unity users who have shared their code on public repositories demonstrating high quality code, but that’s about all I can find. Is everybody else too busy working or am I looking at the wrong places?
Would anybody agree that the forums and answers might be improved if content would be separated more into general, beginner topics and specialized discussions or even expert forums?
Its one of the hazards of the community. We love new users. But often the churn of new users does often drown out more interesting discussions. Heck, even long time hobbyists like me produce a lot of noise that can make getting to serious stuff difficult.
Best strategy I’ve come up with is too just hang around and participate. Good content does surface frequently. You just have to wade through helping beginners to find it.
They’re hired by someone or busy working on their own projects.
The same situation applies to programming in general, by the way. Once you reach certain “plateau” of knowledge, you’ll be unable to get help from communities for most questions and will have to rely on yourself. In case of programming the “plateau” represents average skill, in my opinion.
Usually part of leaving “beginner land” involves leaving tutorials behind. More advanced topics will include white papers that detail the strategy instead of implementation, since implementation is the most trivial part.
There are tons of very knowledgeable people on the forums, but they only bite the interesting threads and often come and go whenever they have the time. You’ll see a lot more “intermediate” users providing frequent support on the forums since more threads fall into the “new/interesting” category for them and their own skills can improve from helping.
As you’ve noticed, helping in threads just to help is often very draining; whereas, when you find a thread with an issue that genuinely grabs your interest, it’s a fun challenge that allows you to improve yourself. Once you get to a certain X level, there just isn’t many of those threads, since anyone at X level is off solving the issue themselves.
You’ll need to create a blog and start posting your experiments and such there then put link in your signature OR start making threads on these forums about things you are doing that are more advanced than the material covered in the Learn section.
Basically if you want more advanced material around here then start posting it. And others will likely join in (or at least shoot down what you post).
Unity is probably the #1 choice for people with absolutely no game dev experience to get started. There are over 4 million users (last I heard) of Unity and the bulk of those would be complets beginners.So yes it creates a lot of noise in the form of the same questions being asked over and over.
Youtube also tends to top out at intermediate level. Plus youtube tutorials are pretty expensive to watch.
One of the general problems with expert level material is it gets very project specific. Take the water and buoyancy model in Pond Wars for example. You won’t find a tutorial anywhere describing the techniques I used to build and tune the water. Unless you are building pretty much exactly the same game, you won’t find much use for the details.
Well yeah, but thats kinda the point. Once you are at that intermediate level, it’s up to you to invent the expert level stuff. If a tutorial existed for the highest possible levels of game development, that would mean every possible challenge was already solved and all the games ever were already invented (And everyone who invented those solutions was willing to give away the store and show everyone how to make everything that makes their game unique)
For advanced developers time is more expensive then anything else.
Have you ever tried to learn an advanced technique from YouTube? First you have to pick a dozen or so videos that might have the answer. Then you have to scan through each video. If one does have the technique then you have to pause the video and copy out the relevant code examples. You have to suffer through a variety of accents and presentation techniques.
Videos are great at the beginner to intermediate level. The content is fairly generic, and there are videos to match every style of learning. They are also useful as background noise. They are often superior to teach the interface.
Almost all advanced users prefer text resources. Its fairly easy to parse a text tutorial in a matter of seconds and decide if its relevant or not. You can copy code samples out directly. You can skip forward or back to any point of interest. And you normally don’t have to suffer through language barriers.
I’m willing to be proven wrong. But I think I have a good feel for the market I serve. (In my head that came out as “Trust me, I’m a YouTuber”. Perhaps I should get that on a T-Shirt.)
