Learning anything new is always a challenge. Especially if you are starting from ground zero, I recently had a client of mine ask for a Unity Interactive that pulls in 100,000+ data points to do a data visualization.
I’m by far no expert in unity3d but this did not stop me. I decided to learn to use Unity and see what all the buzz is about in the game development industry.
I started where most people start – confused and lost.
Where do I even start?
Who do I listen to?
What tutorials or books do I read?
Where do I ask for help?
Do I need to purchase a license?
Will my Mac work for Unity Development?
Will I need to get extra help?
Of course, I had many more questions about learning to create games with Unity.
But I just started, I did not let this hold me back.
I sat down with the client and created a spec of what they had envisioned for the interactive.
Created some prototypes and got to work.
Started with the first scene and continued to work my way through the project.
Getting into the project I realized that I needed help, all of the tutorials that I found were not answering the questions that I had.
Where do you even find Unity Help?
Stackoverflow?
Unity’s Forum?
YouTube?
All of those are great resources but they did not answer my questions.
Instead, I reached out to a friend of mine Jason and asked for help.
He runs unity3d.college, where he helps new developers get going with Unity3D.
I needed the help ASAP, my project’s deadline was getting closer and closer and I was not making much progress.
Jason is the REAL deal, someone that knows the in’s and outs of Unity and C# and he helped me to quickly get up to speed with Game Development.
In just a couple of hours of asking the right questions, I was off to create my own game.
Anytime you are learning something new it’s always a good idea to ask an expert for help.
You obviously don’t want to waste their time so make sure that you always do your homework before reaching out and when you feel that you are really stuck, take a couple of minutes and create a real question and just simply ask it.
So many times when you are learning something new you tend to get stuck in the loop that you can figure everything out yourself.
Don’t get me wrong.
I went through video tutorial after video tutorial on YouTube and to be honest.
All of the video’s put me right to sleep.
I don’t care about shading a sphere, I want to create my game!
I want to get down to the nuts and bolts of writing some C# code not trying to figure out what a nest of nesting menus does.
In summary, if you feel stuck just take the time and reach out to those that have been there and done that before, it will save you hours of frustration.
Talk soon,
Rick H.
P.S. Jason is awesome and I can vouch for his work. If you are interested in Virtual Reality with Unity check out his course.
Professional VR Game Development Course
I always had a passion for the field of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) and I knew I wanted to do something to make a difference in the world. I just didn’t know where to start. I was an immigrant in a new country, grew up in a tough environment, and wasn’t sure how… Read More
