Hey everyone! I literally joined this forum 4 minutes ago and would really appreciate if someone could link me to any stickies or good threads for a total noob to read through! I majored in music and got my Bachelors degree at 21 but I haven’t been able to find a career in it and have been doing temp work for the past 2 years and not progressing as a human whatsoever. I guess I had somewhat of an epiphany and decided since I am a total nerd and gamer I should apply my intelligence to making apps/games for the iPhone, so I bought Unity Pro with the last of my savings and am going full throttle studying and brainstorming app ideas. I know a lot of people are thinking “Hey kid, this isn’t something you can just pick up overnight” and I do realize this but like I said earlier I’m sick of slaving away doing physical labor for $12 / hour when I know I am smart enough to learn this if I apply myself enough.
Ok, enough with the intro! I would really appreciate it if anyone could point me in the right direction and save me some time and frustration, because I know for a lot of things I wish I could have had someone from the start mentoring me. I’m guessing most of the learning will just be hands-on experience with the software after I finish learning JavaScript and C#, but are there any tutorials or links to things I should read through (maybe a manual or terminology guide?), because I tried going through some of the threads and I have no idea what half of the terms you guys are using refer too lol :-?
Thanks again in advance!
Alex
*PS: I forgot to add I am pretty fluent (BAS degree / Pro Tools Certified / Logic Pro Certified) with composing and SFX for games and can help anyone out with their game/app in return for mentoring.
There isn’t a perfect “Start Here” place that will make you a perfect game dev. The supermeatboy article pretty much sums it up. Come up with an idea for a game that excites you and get to work on it. Watch tutorials for specific things (animation, physics, AI, etc) and build small pieces of the game at a time. A really good site that I like is Unitycookie.com. Lots of good tuts their to watch and learn from. Tutorials and blog posts will only take you so far. You need to buckle down, crack open Unity and just start building.
My suggestion would be to come up with some very small simple games to begin. Don’t try to recreate Call of Duty or Halo, yet. Start with something simple and seemingly stupid like “knock over as many barrels within 30 seconds as possible”. This gives you a very focused goal that you can reach. Sure the game may never make it to the top charts of iTunes, but you will learn a lot about the engine. Chances are you will write a script that you will use in your next game that will make that one much easier. After you build the simple game you can expand on that and add things like incoming missiles that you have to dodge while knocking over barrels and dodging zombies, because why not?
My point is that you will start to layer the gameplay and you will gradually create a more complex game, all the time you will be learning how everything works and clicks together.
Very helpful post @n8! Starting with a very simple idea like knocking over barrels and then just adding new gameplay elements is a simple idea but incredibly powerful and I’m glad you brought it to my attention, because that is exactly what I’m going to do when I make my first game
@nocanwin: Thanks for the links bro! The Walker Boys studio one is f***ing incredible! I can’t believe they are essentially giving away a full online college class for free, but hey I am not complaining! I really appreciate all the time they took with the videos to help newbies out like me. The other links are not really helpful compared to the Walker Boys but I appreciate that you linked them anyway
