I've studied the Roll-A-Ball lesson, where should I go now?

Hi,

Over the past couple weeks (would have been sooner, damn work) I've learned how to work with Unity to make a basic Roll-A-Ball game. I skipped over the scripting lessons and just cut and pasted them since I'm currently awaiting for my Unity scripting for beginners manual to arrive in the next week or two and I don't want to get confused by all the terminology.

So my question is, where do I go from here? I've learned the basic way of how to get around Unity and to move a sphere, great. But I've noticed that the lessons go directly into how to make third person shooters, mystery games, etc. without actually teaching me how to create the customised characters and environments.

Should I now look into downloading an engine to create my own custom characters and environments? Should I wait for the arrival of my scripting book and study that first?

Thanks.

 

Unity is an engine. I assume you're talking about downloading some third-party game kits that try to do 90% of creating a game for you, and in that case, I would strongly urge you not to do that.

Unity is, on the whole, wonderfully designed — it abstracts away just the right amount of detail, giving us a product that is quickly understandable, without having to worry about a lot of the low-level details.

When you download one of these game kits, however, what they've done is built a whole bunch of new complexity on top of Unity. They do this because the games they're trying to help you create are inherently complex. But as a beginner, you don't need to create games that complex, and you certainly don't need more complexity to cope with as you're learning.

So, keep it simple. Use what's in the box. Do some more tutorials... or redo this one, without skipping over the scripting. (If it's a good tutorial, you don't need a book, nor will it confuse you when you get the book... seeing the same material presented in different ways will be extremely beneficial.)

Or take the tutorial that you've done and play with it. Can you make the ball a different color? What about the terrain (or whatever) it's rolling on? Can you add sound effects? Can you add a key that makes the ball jump? Tackle small, bite-sized enhancements like these. Read the documentation and reference manual, trying to figure out how to do them yourselves, and when you get stuck, ask a (clear, specific) question here, and we'll help!

And have fun — you've come to a happy place and are in for a great ride!

Cheers,
- Joe

 

Thank you, JoeStrout!

Responses like yours are one of the biggest reasons why I chose to use Unity. Many of the people here are incredibly helpful and courteous!

Also your are correct, I was referring to the third-party game kits that I, until now, thought you needed to use to create your designs. I am happy to learn that that all can be done with Unity. Like you said, as a beginner I am not very picky with complex details for the game I want to build as I always prefer game play and storyline over graphics and details. In fact, lately I've been playing PSone games such as Metal Gear Solid and Syphon Filter more than any of the current generation games because of how much I enjoy their game play.

Thanks again, I am very much looking forward to learning the scripting both with the tutorials here on Unity as well as with my book.

 

After you start learning the basics of scripting go back to the roll a ball you made & try to add something to it. This way you will know if it works without having to script a whole thing around it so you will find out quickly. You will also learn how small changes can alter a game a lot.

Good luck

 

Sorry I didn't read previous answers but my advice would be:
1. Complete another tutorial from unity (space shooter or scavanger)
2. Create your own project (simple like pong or so) and use old tutorials as refference

 

Thanks guys! I will take this advice for sure. Originally I intended to create my "dream" game as I learn, but I've decided to tweak with the roll a ball game and create a simple sphere shooter that incorporates all of the basics (movement, jumping, collecting, shooting enemies, etc.)

 

I would do the first three tutorials - roll a ball, space shooter, survival shooter. I was able to use concepts from those three to make quite a bit of progress on my first "from scratch" game.

 

You don't need a scripting book or manual, it's better to take notes from videos and write down your own handbook:
1) Visit Scripting section and finish the beginner lessons
2) Complete the first 3 projects (Roll-a-ball tutorial, Space Shooter tutorial, Survival Shooter tutorial)
3) Back to the Lessons section and start looking at different topics like physics, navigation, mobile development..
4) Here you should master using Unity API and know how to get the required info from it
5) Finish 2D Roguelike tutorial, this will add the 2D skills to your knowledge

Review and update your handbook frequently & have fun!

 

Thanks for all the feedback!

I've since further perfected my basic Unity skills by playing around with my Roll-a-Ball game. I've practised editing the environment, re-adjusting the cubes and added more, added more walls and turned the game into a maze format, and even learned to add background music.

However, I've since decided that I want to begin creating a character from scratch. But I am very overwhelmed by the number of tutorials out there. The problem I have with the tutorials is that all of them begin with the character already created and start by teaching you how to move them.

I'm not at that point yet, I need to learn how to create and import characters first before I can try to move them. My current goal is to replace my sphere player in Roll-a-Ball with an actual character.

Can someone please direct me to a tutorial or manual that can teach someone who have never created a character before to do so? As a beginner I would much prefer to create my character on Unity rather than a 3rd party program such as Maya or Blender, or at least a free 3rd party program if that is an option.

Thanks!

 

If that's going to be a rigged & animated character that's a massive step up from what you just did which is probably why you are overwhelmed. You're just starting with unity & now you also want to learn modelling?

If you want a decent model I'm reasonably sure you will need to do it in an art program like maya or blender. In class we had to do it this way as we were told unity only does primitives. To get decent models in those systems we had to make high poly models,make u 's, texture them, reduce the poly's & other stuff which I just never managed to get right.

 

If going from the basics of Unity to modelling is too much of a big step for a beginner then I have no issue with just focusing on the coding itself for the next little while.

But eventually I would really like to create my own characters in my games.

 

Do what everyone is telling all new comers ( I was told the same thing & am still working through it all). Work your way through the tutorials, they are pretty much in order of progression, then test your knowledge by altering the tutorial games you did to see if they still work & what your changes mean for game play, flow, enjoyment etc.

Personally I'm still learning to code mechanics, next I'll do sound then lighting then particles as I think you can add a lot to a game if they are done well even without animation. I've also found from trial & error that simple changes can have a massive impact on how a game plays e.g. I built a 2d shmup using keyboard controls & balanced it to last me about 3minutes per game. I then added game pad support & the game was to easy (I quit after 5minutes with 90% health & shields). So I added extra bullets when I shot which meant power ups were destroyed more often & the game was rebalanced to roughly 3mins, but then it wasn't playable on keyboard. These were valuable lessons that I still have to consider when working out how the game will be controlled & how I will cater to multiple control options in the one game.

 

Thanks, tedthebug!

I will just focus on the tutorials, take notes and try and master the general features of Unity before I jump into modelling. I tend to jump too far ahead at times.

 

You at confusing what Unity does and does not do. Unity is a game engine. That means you put in all of your game assets and tie them together with code.

It's not a place to create models and animations, that is all done in a third party software dedicated to modelling and animation. So if you want to make characters and environments, you are in the wrong place. Unity inports and manipulates these things, but it's not used for creation.

Also curious as to how you skipped the scripting in roll a ball. That tutorial has nothing else in it.

 

I originally skipped the coding sections in RaB tutorials because I just wanted to learn how to maneuver around and use the basics in Unity. Now that I've grasped that I am now going back and learning the scripting itself. I would have been too overwhelmed if I tried to learn Unity's features AND the scripting at once so I'm doing just one at a time. Just three weeks ago I had no idea how to even add a plane, now I am able to create a complete environment with a ground, walls, etc. And have learned how to tie scripts with prefabs to turn them into dynamic objects. So now I'm going back to the RaB tutorials and focusing just on the scripting. The RaB tutorial also shows how to add the basic assets so I just focused on that at first

Also, yes I thought that Unity allowed you to create characters. But now that I've learned that I need a 3rd party engine to do that, I am just going to study and work with Unity using only the primitives they offer then, eventually, study an engine to import models to my game. Most likely Blender since it's free.

 

"Engine" is not the correct term here. Unity is an "Engine". Blender is a 3D graphics application capable of modelling, rigging and animating 3D models. It can also help you with texturing but there are way better applications out there for that task. I'm just telling you this because getting the terminology right will make your life a lot easier when you search for tutorials on google. That said blender is an excellent choice and I encourage you to check out http://www.blenderguru.com/ if you want to learn how to use it.

And since I'm already being pedantic: technically Blender actually IS also a game engine, but that part of the application is not very popular and other game engines like unity are leaps and bounds ahead of the blender game engine and if you search for it when in fact you just want to learn modelling then you will come up with the wrong results.

 

Yeah, the game engine part of Blender is more built to allow physics simulation to create animations and renders more efficiently. Its not built for publishing games. (I sure someone has done it though).