As part of our first foray into game design, we have to explore Unity, a famous game engine used by major companies worldwide. It was a journey of ups and downs, but I learned quite a bit from following the Unity Essentials Pathway. So the first thing that stood out to me was that Unity had actual tutorials for their new users. This is a sharp contrast in comparison to our previous program, 3DS Max, which we navigated through a variety of shoddy user-submitted tutorials. It was refreshing to have actual step-by-step instructions written by professionals of Unity, as there was no user-dependent confusion, and there was even a comments section for every tutorial that had the Unity community come together to work on any issues encountered by the program. It was really nice to have actual tutorials to depend on.
However, on the flip side, some of the instructions were vague or unclear (9 times out of 10, the comments section feature of them helped) or agonized so long over such few steps that I couldn't help but resist the urge sometimes to just scroll all the way down and hit "Mark all as completed". Yes, sue me, but it was information I already knew. What amazed me the most working in the Unity Game engine was how approachable it was. Maybe because I came from similar programs visually like 3DS Max, but a lot of the tools, features, and functions were the same. However, the Unity Learn Essentials Pathway could use some more work elaborating on scripting and how to manipulate scripts. Many of those taking this pathway do not come from a programming background, so it's important to be concise and specific with the scripting tutorials. To give someone a script to say "Hello, World!" and tell them to change it so that an object moves in space is an insane task for a beginner to handle independently. And yes, I looked on online forums. It was daunting. The easiest thing I could do in Unity was adding materials, adding sprites/shapes (aka primitives), manipulating them, and even making them collide with each other and abide by gravity. This was all similar to how 3DS Max worked, so my knowledge from using that program extensively for 2 years came in handy. The most difficult thing to do in Unity was definitely scripting. Not just copy and pasting scripts, no, even a 5-year-old could do that, but manipulating them. No matter how many times I tried, I couldn't make heads or tails of the strings. In general, after working with Unity for five days, I found the pathway mostly approachable and a good introduction into getting my toes dipped into the world of Unity. However, the learning process was disrupted by how much we were forced to learn in a short period of time. I underwent a lot of stress because of the deadline I was expected to turn my work in by as well as the sheer volume of work this pathway had; enough stress that it just wasn't worth the cost of my mental health. A period of two weeks to work on this program is perfectly acceptable, but we had one. Ergo, it's time to hit the books in programming, so let's see what we can do next!
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AuthorHey, Jay Phung here. This is my blog where I reflect on various assignments from Game Design! Please enjoy your stay (´・ω・`). Archives
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