Experience programmer: where to begin?

Hey all!

I've recently started looking into Unity as a hobby and possible to use it in our company (web/software development). I'm a rather experienced programmer in all sorts of languages, have tried to learn Blender a few times but didn't persist (other stuff got more interesting). I.e. I know programming quite well and know about 3d (modelling) averagely.

I've tried the first two tutorials (simple ball and space shooter) and found them a little simple and slow paced, since most starters seem to know next-to-nothing about programming (logically). Also the difference between Unity 4 and 2017 seems to be rather large up to the point where the tutorials take a path I can't. I want to learn about best practices, common implementations/mistakes and basically how to set up fun (not necessarily realistic graphics) 2D and 3D games. Do you guys have any tips as to where to start? Good tutorials by a youtuber or a specific tutorial that'll get me a long way?

All help is greatly appreciated, thanks a lot!

 

Hello. I'm you, from 3.5 years in the future!

That is to say, I'm a daytime web developer doing Unity stuff as a hobby. Three years or so ago, I started getting into it a bit more heavily and found the tutorials to be too basic to keep my interest. I wanted to learn all the best practices first, then dive straight into making a great game.

This is kind of tricky, but just forget best practices for now. Tinker. Make sloppy things that do something interesting. Refactor, enhance, and read documentation. Experiment. And do the tutorials, as boring as you may find them initially. There are hidden gems of information in there that make it worth your time, and even if you only pick up one or two interface tidbits, that could save you hours in your workflow down the road.

When you feel comfortable with the Editor and API, consider cloning an old classic game. Or if that doesn't interest you, come up with an absolute bare-bones idea for a simplistic game and see it through from start to finish.Add things like menus and saving/loading, music settings, etc. All that little stuff adds up to a lot of knowledge to acquire, and you'll find out on your own which methodologies and practices work best for you (for example, I like the "singleton/manager" approach, while others prefer the "component swarm").

In 3.5 years, I've only published one game and left a dozen unfinished. That's my curse as a hobbyist, I guess. But I think if I had let go of my desire for structure and finding that "right way" to do stuff early on, it would have cured me of a lot of the paralysis that held me back from just cranking things out early on.

Good luck!