In the past, I have spent hours watching tutorials on how to use Unity, and I've also attended a Game Jam where the engine we used was Unity. So, although I do not consider myself a complete noob, I feel as though I do lack some fundamental knowledge that I would like to dig deeper into. With that said, I decided to start the Complete Unity 5 Developer course on Udemy. I purchased this course when it was on sale, at the beginning of the summer and only used it as a reference when I needed some assistance in a particular area. But after a recent decision I made to streamline my focus (I may write a post on that later), I decided to really sit down and take this course from start to finish. I'm extremely happy about my decision thus far Usually, whenever I sit through a programming tool's training, I want to pull my hair out because of the elementary concepts that are covered in the content. I always feel the urge to skip around and sometimes I feel as though I'm missing out on small nuggets of information that I could really benefit from. This leaves me with a dilemma, do I sit through the boring stuff for the possibility of some new piece of information? OR do I skip around and forgo the hair pulling in exchange for the ability to learn at a rapid pace? However, I find that the way that this particular course is structured, I don't feel as though I'm missing out on anything if I just play it in the background while I go on my own. If I hear something that piques my interest, I tab over and check it out, otherwise I go on my merry way. Also, there are some good nuggets there about Game Design Documents and how to properly ask questions, which I found really beneficial. How will I share what I've learned? By no means are the things I'm learning things that I would want to put in my portfolio. But I want to share them, so I will do that through my blog :). After just a couple of hours (mostly spent feeling out the tools), I was able to build my first full game from an empty project to a build uploaded to my website. The game concept is straight from the tutorial and the dialog is rather dry (I can't deny it). But I'm proud of my little game and I can not wait for what's to come in the near future. Want to check it out? Make sure you're in a browser other than Chrome :) and click below! Prison GameWhere to now? I'm not a game writer lol. So, I'm partnering up with a good author friend who has agreed to help me create a new Text Adventure game. He'll do all of the writing (thank God) and I will do the programming. I totally can not wait. Stay tuned, as always :) Want to get your feet wet with game development? You really should try Unity, it's free for personal use.
It's been a month since school let out and I have had a chance to recuperate from a vigorous semester full of... Math... Now that I'm not longer seeing integrals in my sleep, I've had the change to devise some set goals to accomplish this summer. The realization that this will be the last summer where I will have a considerable amount of free time, I decided that it would be best to spend my time wisely. Although there are no plans of forgoing sleeping in and reading Word of Radiance for hours, I do have a plan to add a substantial amount of productivity to my summer vacation. So, what are my goals, you ask? Well, before I get into my goals, another epiphany was that although I have learned quite a bit in the past couple of months, I don't really have any way of showing what I've learned. Apart from cheesy homework assignments, I haven't really had the time to work on any resemblance of a portfolio. To add insult to injury, my website, at the time, looked like a drunken toddler made it in the midst of a temper tantrum. In other words, I really have no way to showing what I've learned, nor do I have concrete representations of what I would like to do with my programming knowledge upon graduation. What a nasty web I have woven for myself... But, this summer I aim to change the status quo. The first step was to update my drunken toddler website, which I'm in the process of doing now. But, there are some other major tasks that I really want to get to which are: Unity 5 Training & C# Learning Swift for iOS Learning Android Studio Blender Maya UX Design Foundation Sass I know... a lofty list. I will probably get to possibly 1-2 things off of this list, but I believe that it's good to have aggressive goals, even if I only get to a quarter of this list, it would be greatly beneficial to me. Either way, I plan to blog throughout the summer, sharing my experiences with what I learn. It should be an interesting ride. :)