Where are all the Unity text tutorials?

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1

I’ve looked like crazy, and I can’t find much…

The only one I’ve found is this:

And while those are good, they are a bit specific, what I’m looking for is something like the tutorials posted here on the official site (Learn game development w/ Unity | Courses & tutorials in game design, VR, AR, & Real-time 3D | Unity Learn) but they are all video tutorials as far as I can see…
There is also the unity reference, but I’m looking for tutorials, not references…

I’m thinking of copying the transcripts for the video tutorials, and edit them, adding pictures and such, but that seems very time-consuming…

My main question is where I can find text tutorials, but I’ll throw in this little rant as well, so you can see where I’m coming from:
I just don’t get this obsession with video tutorials, especially for programming and generally for learning programs.
It’s either hard to keep up or too slow, it’s impossible to reference, since there is nothing to search on, and most times there is really no need to use moving pictures or sound to show what needs to be done. Where there is need for video and/or sound, then you can of course have a video or sound file demonstrating that particular thing, but those should be short, and demonstrate a specific thing/procedure, that would be hard to express in words/pictures.
So with that, I reiterate the title question, where the **** are the text tutorials?

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2

I feel your pain.

Finding text tutorials is very difficult. Finding good text tutorials is almost impossible. Barring a small number of well received Unity-specific books, people just don’t put time into creating written tutorials, apart from people who are blogging their ideas or small snippets like at Unity Gems. (Programming books are another matter, because those get used in college courses.)

I only have theories. I know that video tutorials are very popular, so they may be self-perpetuating over the use of written ones. I know that, at least in the US, a lot of the society seems to have moved away from reading and focuses entirely on visual media like television and movies.

I also think part of it is that written tutorials are hard to make. You have to write them, then polish them, then polish them some more. Poor writing skills are also a problem, as far more people can speak semi-coherent sentences than can write them. (Again, based on my experience in the US.)

There is also the fact that if you look at a lot of video tutorials, it is clear the person making them has no script. They just have some general ideas of what they are going to cover, maybe even a list of notes, and they are mostly winging it. The medium is quick, easy, dirty, and forgiving. If the video creator makes a mistake, they just say, “Oops, not this, do that.”

If you have any familiarity with tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons, in some ways it is like the difference between writing an adventure module or short story in the setting versus playing a game session by the seat of your pants. A lot less work goes into the latter, so you will see a lot more game masters (myself included) running than writing.

I think that turned into a bit of a rant. Apologies.

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Two things:

First, sadly, Unity Gems seems to have gone down a few months ago and can only be accessed thru the internet archives’ time machine which sadly/annoyingly doesn’t include all of the associated media. If you have a good link, please let me know!

Second, yes, it’s unclear why we don’t have more written tutorials. There is certainly a strong interest in video material and our video materials are well received and have a heavy “hit count”. The only concrete information I can pass on is that we have actively made the decision not to “double up” and make parallel written material for our videos, so we wouldn’t, say for example, make a written project for roll-a-ball or space shooter. As we have the project available in one form, we wouldn’t necessarily make it in another.

I can definitely understand the desire for something like a coding project to be written, but we don’t really go very deep into coding practices beyond a quick “reference/reminder/taster” in our scripting section of the learn site. It’s a difficult and somewhat controversial topic: How much coding do we teach? Inevitably we need to teach some/a lot of coding, but should we be teaching C#? or Unity? It’s much debated.

One thing that we hope helps when watching the Unity videos in context with the Learn section pages (not directly on YouTube) is that we link reference pages from other places, including our documentation and other lessons, to make searching easier. We also include all of the code in a selectable form below the lesson, so you can copy as much of the final code as you need.

We are also trying to improve the content in the manual with more detail:

and more HowTo’s - :
Image of the Unity Manual with HowTo’s shown

2045191--132822--Screenshot 2015-03-30 11.37.19.png
2045191--132822--Screenshot 2015-03-30 11.37.19.png280×703 33.1 KB

Are you primarily looking for coding resources? Tutorial walk-thrus?

If you have any specific request, please let me/us know and we’ll see what we can do for you.

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4

Well, you kind of answered my question with the statement that you won’t make written tutorials that follow your current ones, since those kinds of tutorials are the ones I want (in written form): a project that covers the entire process of making something simple and publishing it. While there are nice tutorials on how to do specific things like procedural meshes or random generated mazes (from the catlike coding page), those are more for when you already have a good grasp of the basics in the entire process, and want to branch of into your own game-making.

For now I’ll just have to bite the bullet and do the video tutorials, since there really are no more options, but one question I do have is if I do take the effort and transcribe the video tutorials on this site, is there a possibility of me being able to publish them, and if so, how? It would be very nice to have my hard work of solving this problem benefit others =).

As a tangential question, are there any good tools/websites for making well formatted texts? Regardless if I have permission to publish/post the transcriptions, I would like to learn more about making good written content for when I eventually have the knowledge to make my own tutorials =).

EDIT:
Here is a sample of what I’d do with the tutorial, which I did using the subtitle transcripts from the Youtube page of the Roll-a-ball tutorial, inserting it into LibreOffice Writer and then editing it, adding pictures, and adding some extra text (to address the differences of the tutorial video and Unity 5).

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Wow! Impressed!

First off, yes, if you transcribe these, we can hook you up as one of the community authors and publish them to our site.

Second: STOP!!!

I will be publishing a new version of Roll-a-ball with hope this week, updated for Unity 5.

This may save you some trouble.

Next, we publish in a mark up (mark down, actually) language for our web pages, so the most important part if the text, and the embedding the images.

Lastly, you are correct: we won’t duplicate projects, but it’s not beyond imagination that we won’t make a new project that is presented in a text based way.

If you’re determined to do this, then what would be best would be to get the transcriptions ready and prep the in-line graphics, and I can let you know what our markup tags are for making the text.

Tho’ I am producing a new set of Unity 5 episodes for Roll-a-ball, I will be reusing most of the voice over from this version, so any work you’ve done will be 85% correct, and only specific sections will need to be cut or altered.

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Hey - cool thing. :slight_smile:
If you want to go for an actual word processor instead of something like OpenOffice/Word you might have a look at TeX. It’s designed to format and manage large masses of texts like scientific papers and such and uses a HTML/CSS like markup language for formatting. It’s by far not an intuitive thing to do, though.

@Adam-Buckner_1 maybe a few more code heavy tutorials could be made in written form?
Speaking for myself I like the video tutorials and actually prefer them most of the time. Yet at some point I guess the teaching team will run out of strictly basics to show so maybe it would be interesting to see if there is a demand for a few written and rather code heavy tutorials as well?
I sure would like to read about deeper project designing and structuring in the future and for code heavy stuff maybe that could work better than a video?

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As someone whose full-time job is making game dev tutorials, I’ll give you my take on it.

Video tutorials are faster for me to create – much faster. And I can charge more for a video course than I can for a written tutorial. Plus, if the tutorial is aimed at beginners it’s easier for them to follow along because they can see exactly what I’m doing – there’s no disconnect between words that I write and what they think they’ve read.

It’s not complicated to create a good tutorial video, but you have to be willing to spend time editing it. For a 5-8 minute video I’ll often spend 45-60 minutes on editing (sometimes I get lucky and it’s 30ish) in order to chop out pauses, places where I mistyped, etc.

The biggest pro to doing written is that it’s easier to change something when the game engine itself changes – you don’t have to recreate umpteen minutes/hours of video. But I’m not sure that pro outweighs the cons.

Jay

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Thank you for posting this. It’s always good to see what the perspective is like from someone who is doing it continually, rather than just from those of us looking in from the outside.

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Awesome, and no problem, I’ve been a bit busy the latest days, so I haven’t put any work in yet, it was also somewhat on the back burner because I was aware from somewhere (can’t remember where) that there was going to be a new update for the Roll-a-ball tutorial.

Well, since this seems to be pretty well-received, I think I’d at least try to do the Roll-a-ball tutorial, since it’s a good start for both Unity beginners and tutorial-writing beginners =P.
If there is a way to test the markdown somehow, that would be very appreciated, because then I can go wild with my testing without breaking anything (though I’m guessing there’s not much that can be done =P)
EDIT: found this, will be testing some stuff, and see what I can get =)

That is true, but the main point still stands though; for many it can be hard to follow along with a video, they are not for everyone, some prefer text. If there is a good mix between the video and text tutorials, no one loses, but in the case of unity there is a very clear lack of the latter, which for some is a big hurdle to get over when learning Unity.

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I’m creating some beginners tutorials at the moment. PDFs with embedded short videos. You might like to have a look at my first one here

I should say that producing tutorials in this format is a lot of work, a lot more than making video tutorials (of which I have 100 on YouTube) or written notes (of which I have plenty as I teach programming at tertiary level). My first tutorial is free, but I’ll be charging for the rest. Not too much of course.

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Nice! The layout is a bit odd, and the videos don’t seem to be working for me at first try, but I’ll try it later when I have more time =).

12

It’s a worry that the videos aren’t playing. I’ve had a few people download and play them to make sure. Are you using Adobe Acrobat Reader (or Acrobat Pro)? Some browsers don’t play them I know. The videos actually play in a separate window, not right in the page.

I designed the layout (supposedly 1024 x 768 but InDesign is a bit funny about the sizes of things intended for viewing on a monitor) so that the videos are a decent size on a tablet. The horizontal format suit monitors better.

This is what it should look like in Acrobat Reader (this is actually Part B, but A and B both work the same)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EueOmtBdW7I

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Well I’m using Foxit Reader, so that might be the problem there, I guess you can try dowloading that and see what you get, I can’t get Adobe reader at the moment since something does not want to work well with it (I prefer Foxit, so I haven’t put any effort in fixing the problem)

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I tried Foxit Reader and the videos wouldn’t play. The Foxit site says Foxit now supports embedded media. The video did try to open and then immediately closed again. I suspect it’s a security issue, as it seems to think it’s getting the video from a remote site (a security warning did pop up). I’ll look into it further. I must admit I was relying on the ubiquity of Acrobat Reader.

The videos do play in IE on my computer, but not Google Chrome or Firefox. My son says they play in Safari on his Mac.

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I’ve created a version in which the videos play ‘in the page’ and not in floating windows. It does work in Foxit Reader, although the video quality is not as good and I had to reformat one page because it doesn’t work if the video in the page is small. I may look into other options if there seems to be enough demand. Just to to the original link on my website and you should see two files on PayLoadz - the NAR one is for ‘Not Acrobat Reader’

I’ll put any further discussion of my particular tutorials on the thread I created for that, elsewhere in the Teaching section of the forum.