Is there a need for a Unity tutorial, starting from zero?

Hello guys,

I'd like to write a tutorial on making a game in Unity, targeting at people with no prior experience with game engines or programming. Do you think there is a need for such a thing (so I don't utterly waste my time with stuff like that)? It would, of course, be mostly targeted at hobbyists.

Thanks in advance for your input!

-- Stephan

 

It seems like every tutorial out there is for people with no to little prior experience. With that being said, there is probably always room for another tutorial simply because every person has their own style and a certain X percent of the population will relate to them (or at least their style) better than they would to others.

 

Yeah, I would like to write a tutorial that really addresses how stuff comes together in Unity and also tries to give people an understanding on how this programming stuff works, anyway. (Big goals, I know.)

I haven't seen much that does that yet, and think the example projects are pretty bad at it. Also, I really dislike Youtube tuts, so this would be text+screenshots.

 

That sounds useful because, I agree, the tutorials I have seen the coding kind of makes me cringe at times. It often looks like a beginning programmer is trying to teach others how to program. I give them credit for wanting to share and help though!

 

Thanks for the feedback, I'll just try and get typing.

 

I'm interested in why you dislike YT tutorials. I know quite a few others do too, but I've never seen a reason. Of course it could just be a preference but maybe there's a specific reason. I produce YT tutorials myself so I'm interested to know.

 

It's hard to find a certain information fast in them (if you come to it with partial knowledge about the topic), they have a horrible information density, and you can't follow them in your own speed unless you like to pause and unpause them all the time.

 

The main reason why I hate video tutorials is the plain lack of ctrl f.

Pretty sure many people agree here.

 

Thanks, all very important points. Many young people seem to prefer video however. I teach Java programming for a living, and most of my students won't read a textbook, although they will usually read my notes. I make VTs to support that and quite a few prefer those.

 

I'm not a fan simply because I prefer written illustrated tutorials where I can go back and read bits if I've missed instead of scrubbing back a video.

 

That makes me feel incredibly old.

 

For computer graphics I find screenshots can be quite limiting. I'm trialing a form of tutorial that includes more text than a typical YT video, but uses video clips instead of screenshots. The Rhino help files work this way and I think it's a good way to go. Check out my first attempt if you're interested. It took a lot of work to set up though.
http://www.gamedzine.com/index.php/bare-bones-tutorials/gimp/draw-a-character/86-draw-the-face

 

Animated GIFs might be an interesting choice for that... they're coming back in fashion, anyway.

 

I think teaching introductory Unity and programming are two separate concerns. You could easily write 100+ pages on using Unity without touching code (Game Objects, Components, Prefabs, Meshes, Lights, Cameras, Rendering, Shaders, Mecanim, Terrains, Sprites, GUI, Physics, Light Mapping, Input, etc, etc). You might need a few small code snippets, and you may want to describe them in a breakout for those who are interested, but I think mixing the two would likely lead to a lack of focus.

 

I strongly agree with this. I think of learning to program inside Unity as being like learning to drive in busy city traffic. I have some basic C# tutorials on my YT channel, aimed at new Unity developers but not using Unity, to teach some basic programming concepts. I use MonoDevelop (or Xamarin Studio) to keep in touch with the Unity focus however.

 

But I don't want to be comprehensive on either part. I want to offer the basic knowledge of both Unity's concepts and programming that people need to get into the pool, so they can go to topic-specific tutorials and know how to apply them, that they understand how everything comes together in the end, because even I as an experienced hobby programmer had problems with that and I can see how a newbie might be totally stunned by the information overload.

 

I remember my Java class back in college. Our instruction specifically stated the book, while required by the college for the class, was a complete waste of time and horribly written. We ended up using some stuff he put together and the Java API docs.

The book was made by Deitel. In retrospect it is rather amusing how, for an object-oriented language, the book never took advantage of object-oriented concepts.

 

At this point it kind of feels like everyone and their mother has done the entry level unity tutorial. Even vertical slice tutorials (where all different aspects are explored) seem to be pretty common.

I prefer text because videos mostly coding are just the stupidest thing on the planet to watch. The flip side is I also think textbooks are mostly written by pompous idiots with their head so far up their ass that they actually start to think that they wrote something in english.

Yeah, I didn't like my college textbooks. The sad part is I also understood them. I have no idea how most people would have been able to though.

 

I have a bunch. Not so much directed at tutorials as directed at "documentation" provided in video format, though it's valid for both.

- It's slower to consume. I read faster than a (good) presenter talks.

- It's harder to skim backwards/forwards through information. You need to twiddle timeline/play/pause etc. This is a pain when you want to go over a point again, find a specific point in review, read/listen to the same section multiple times, or consume a section in a non-linear order.

- The linearity is worth mentioning in its own right. I often read materials out-of-order. Videos don't really work like that.

- You can't skim a video easily. I'll often skim a book when I first get it, then pick bits and read/study them in detail when I need them.

- Some info is easier to deliver in a tabular or diagram format, and that stuff commonly (though not always) sucks in videos. Plenty of the technical books I have here use tables or diagrams to make info digestable and navigable, and quick to reference later. Sure you can whack a table or diagram in a video, but that hits several bumps already mentioned - having to mess with the controls to play/pause/etc to look at it, not being able to easily bring it back up for review, losing your place if you want to review it while looking at something else in the same video - plus technical issues like resolution - even a 1080p image is nothing compared to a standard page in a printed book.

You could point out that lectures also have many of these problems, but the key difference is that they're interactive and typically come with written materials. You can ask questions or discuss a point at the time with the lecturer, and if there's a diagram or table they'll typically give you the diagram or table.

Video is definitely useful for some things, but I think it's best used as a part of the information delivery, rather than as the whole information delivery.

 

I don't like them because it takes too much time. Give me text and step by step with screenshots. I can then determine in less than half a minute if the info I need is in there by speed scanning the text and screenshots. As well.. I can reread the text easily in a second to get confusing procedures straight. Videos have to be stopped and started and rewound. Yesterday I was trying to implement tracks for a runner game in MegaFiers. Chris does all his tutorials in video and docs are sparse. It was more than frustrating stopping and starting and with an 8 to 10 minutes of video i never found the info I needed for my custom version. With step by step text I could have isolated the functionality I needed.

 

This is my preferred method of learning as well. Give me documentation with plenty of screenshots any day over videos.

If videos are going to be included, they shouldn't be long and trying to cover multiple topics. Better to divide them up into short segments that cover specific sub-topics. At least that way I can go to specifically the part I am interested in.

 

I think doing a video is alot easier then having to write a coherent walkthrough.

 

I would concentrate on Intermediate/Advanced topics since the Internet is littered with beginner tutorials. Most of them have started writing/making a tutorials series quite enthusiastically but stop maybe after covering a few topics at best.

 

Well sure, making an incoherent video that wanders all over the place is substantially easier than doing a decent write-up. Most of the videos I've seen are usually pure stream of conscience, first take crap with next to no editing, god forbid all the errors that usually end up being fixed later on in a series when it's no longer part of the topic.

 

Well i do think it has its merits you get to experience the dev doing it for the first time and get to see how they trouble shoot it. Otherwise you just get a finished product and dont really understand how its done.

 

So you're agreeing with him that watching YouTube videos shows how not to do it?

 

My issue is mostly turning what should be a short form topic into a long form series. If you solve an issue five episodes later (without any notion that it's being/been fixed), then there is no real point in breaking the topics apart.

It's not much of a problem if you are following the entire series, but it hurts anyone who is coming in for a single topic.

 

Just a idea: You could add excersices for the reader after each chapter.

E.g.: Make a flickering light, build a simple crane simulator, etc.

(Maybe with solutions)

I think it could be more interesting for the reader and improve his knowledge.

 

You know, I have never quite understood that. Video editing pretty much free and stupid easy to do. If you are going to make a tutorial and not bother to edit the parts where you look like fool for not knowing what you are doing, why would trust you in the first place? Ugh.

I tried to watch one a few months back for some reason (animation related, I think), and gave up long before he got the part I was looking for. He rambled about game design, and then when he started coding, he couldn't talk and type and the same time so he would just talk or just type. Once he actually got going, he would run it in the editor every few lines, check the error, switch back and fix it. After about the 4th or 5th round trip, he made some comment like "when you create a new script, a lot the time is spent debugging like this." I shut the browser window.

 

You may make tut for Unity 5 it has many new features which (of course) are not mentioned in older tutorials

 

I personally have both a big library and a lot of videos. I pay for them so I only buy those that are professionally produced. When I learned 3D modelling I found text /screenshots very hard to follow. There's just too much going on. Same for digital painting. I did a texture painting workshop on CGSociety with Lee VanDerByl a while back and that was great. She delivered it almost entirely through video, with some comments and crits on our work in a forum. I guess it depends a lot on the subject matter. Coding doesn't lend itself to video quite as well,

 

I really dislike youtube videos for this same reason. Any serious programmer needs some meaty text to get into with clear indepth explanations.

 

Plus, consider the other side - maintaining the docs. How easy is it to update a piece of text vs. updating a video?

Plus, when docs are updated, with a video it's pretty hard to look at just the updated bits, where with written stuff it's easy (plus there's tools available to help with that).

 

For me, the more tutorials the better. I've used several tutorials, but when I found something I needed to know but couldn't, there was always another tutorial that had the right information I needed.

As for the subject of videos and text, I've been watching the unity tutorials and the scripting API and they're both helpful. The videos had a decent amount of information, but the documentation in the user manual went into even deeper specifics. I like the idea of having both. But I could work with just text.

The combination of the videos and the text help a little 14 year old like me, be OK at it. Being a 14 year old and knowing how to program and build a game is a pretty neat thing. After all..... If there was no tutorials I'd probably still be lying around playing videogames instead of programming things. So I think you should make it. It'd be a great addition to the already existing ones.

 

Reading this makes me feel good about sticking to writing text tutorials. Though I have ideas to supplement them with short videos. The key point is that the videos would be supplementary, used to highlight stuff best seen in motion, and in no way essential. And ideally they're mute, without talking.

 

Don't ever change man. Your stuff was a godsend when I was starting off. Admittedly that was a few years ago when C# was a second class citizen and intermediate tutorials were almost unheard of.

Supplemental videos are fine. Demo's in particular are pretty useful when you just manhandle how it all works. Otherwise, videos for steps that most people won't need a ton of explanation on, like assigning a bunch of materials, but it's still smart just to go through all the steps. Mostly just steps where there isn't a lot to say, but there is a lot to do.

 

Yes. That would be very nice.
I know that alot of Unity novices will appreciate it very much.
Go for it!

 

So... yeah. I'm doing this right now. I'm at the point where I've explained how to get a text on the screen and how to write a script that moves that text when a key is pressed, and already I am at a page count of 14. The whole thing might end up being really extensive. So I am thinking if it might be viable to sell this as an E-Book for, maybe, 10 bucks, and give away the first couple of lessons (I'm structuring it in multiple lessons) for free? As I am mostly targeting beginning hobbyists, I doubt too many people would be willing to pay, but I just can't really judge that.

Any input?