Hello to you, fellow cider connoisseur!

This week, I delved into Unity and C# programming, and – wow. This stuff is beefy, and my progress feels, well, small. Unity itself is an incredibly sophisticated piece of software that will take me years to learn – perhaps the better part of a decade. To make things even gnarlier, proficiency in C# is somewhat of a prerequisite to Unity mastery.

I have a feeling that I’ll need to change up my learning strategy for these rather technical skills. Coding is extremely finicky and sensitive to bugs and glitches, and Unity has literally hundreds of features to learn before one can make a complex game (for example, Stardew Valley).

This week I stuck to the bare-bones-basics of game mechanics like player movement, object collisions, physics, and triggers. These mechanics alone took me several days just to become familiar with. I learned through YouTube tutorials, including a tutorial on how to make a Flappy Bird knockoff game. Another tutorial that I enjoyed but struggled to follow was a crashcourse on how to make a 2D top-down game, which taught movement, combat, tile sets, enemies, etc… While I was able to complete the Flappy Bird tutorial without much trouble, I ran into some dead-ends and code glitches that I couldn’t figure out during the 2D top-down game dev crashcourse, so I stopped that one about half way through.

In conclusion, while I may be able to learn the basics of pixel art and animation through YouTube tutorials, it might be more efficient to learn Unity and C# through a more structured online course. I opted to enroll in the following Udemy courses (Udemy is currently having a 90% sale for Black Friday weekend, so the following three courses costed approximately $40 total).

• Complete C# Course for Unity 2D (focuses on learning C# basics, then takes you through several tutorials to make small games from scratch)
• Roguelike Unity 2D Course (make one big dungeon crawler, complete with randomized dungeons, enemy pathfinding AI, and more)
• Ultimate Guide to RPG creation in Unity 2D (make one big RPG platformer, with multiple levels, skill tree advancements, crafting, and inventory systems)

Collectively, these courses offer roughly 100 hours of lectures. There may be some redundancy between the three of them, but that’s okay because redundancy is a good way to cement things while learning.

Wow, we’re already four weeks into this experiment. I’ll be honest, the difficulty of learning Unity and C# is extremely daunting, and making progress can be frustrating (especially when the only problem is a lacking semi-colon!!!!!!! AGH!!). I sincerely enjoy learning this stuff. Nevertheless, in the face of a pragmatic world, I work daily to protect this dream I have of developing indie games. In short, I’m taking it slow, and keeping level headed about expectations and progress. As long as I enjoy the journey (which I anticipate will be many years, if not forever), the work continues, and the dream becomes closer.

Goals for this week:

1. Continue to learn the basics Unity and C# through the Udemy courses listed above (Start with the C# course)
2. Write my first piece of game music
3. Idle animation for the Goop Sprite (from last week’s post)
4. Stretch goal: create some unique sprites – frog in a bottle, magic dice, glowing axolotl?

Cheers to our dreams,

Wady;