Making a youtube channel of Unity tutorials. What should I start with?

I've been learning Unity and playing around with it for many years now and I've come to the point where I'd like to give back to the community in some way. Unity Answers is a great way to answer the specific questions people may have, and I've also learned a lot from it, but there are so many topics around Unity development that go into such depth that I think a dedicated channel with videos would be a preferable way of teaching what I've picked up over the years.

I know there are already a ton of videos out there but one of the biggest problems I had with them was in the way they tended to focus on the "how" of game development and not the "why". If you've ever followed these kinds of videos before you could probably follow along for whatever technique or concept is focused on but any deviation from the script can easily lead into unknown, and therefore error-prone, territory. My goal with these videos is to start from the ground up and describe the basics of how electricity turns to light on your monitor. Most of the process doesn't need to be visited in a huge amount of detail, and especially not technical detail, but having some idea of why you should or should not do things in game development is a hugely important aspect of being able to make good games efficiently.

My question to the community is: what should I start with? Should I do an overview of why Unity is a good pick in the first place as well as an overview of its competitors? Should I start with an intro to C# fundamentals with Unity? Should I make a specific game and document the full design and development process of it while using it as an object lesson? Should I do something else entirely?

Just to be clear, I do plan on doing all of those things as well as advanced topics like content creation, shaders, procedural generation, and am open to other suggestions. But I do need a place to start so I'm asking where I should focus on first. Thanks for your time and your feedback.

 

One idea could be to get those games that unity used for their tutorials and explain why ppl should separate scripts instead of making one single big script. You could make one single big script that could substitute all of the small ones to show why it's better to use the other method to organize your work

 

i would always ask myself if i add value by doing it
having a youtube channel thats covers stuff thats already there, doesn't make too much sense in my opinion
so either execute it in a way that adds something valueable or cover things that aren't well documented yet
also think about the people this things aim for, beginners, intermediate or experts ? makes a huge difference how to approach things

 

That's a good idea. I had planned something similar for a more advanced video revolving around the Entity-Component system and why it is useful to organize your own code that way as well.

I totally get what you're saying and my intention was to aim this at intermediate users with clear explanations for why the things they see in tutorials are done that way and how to do it their own way while still being mindful of best practices. That said, I'm not entirely sure what level of expertise is too much and too little to cater towards in a tutorial video. When starting with a video teaching about C#, should I go into declaring variables and their types? Should I just declare one like the user already knows how? Should I just create small, bite-sized videos that people can watch for a particular subject that interests them? These are the kinds of things I would like feedback on but otherwise I will just try them out and see if they are of interest to anyone. I should also point out that the intention isn't to highlight something that isn't well-documented yet but to instead make sure the basics are documented well.

 

I am fascinated to learn more about ECS, and I feel its a topic that is sorely lacking proper examples. However, regarding adding value, I do feel that a series on the benefits of ECS should go beyond the typical Match 3 game or other simple scenarios. I feel like some more specific examples would be greatly appreciated. Things like handling global input via ECS, inventory systems, RPG stats etc. I've only come across very simple examples that really dont highlight the true need of ECS for me. All those simple examples show me is how I can take Unity Tanks from working with 100 lines of code to 1000 lines of code for the sake of modularity.

 

I can completely relate. The problem I found with many of those simple examples is that they take shortcuts for the sake of time and ignore best practices as a result. One of my ideas was to actually create a traditional fantasy arpg with all the systems it would normally require, and explain the design and development process along the way. Is that something you'd be interested in or did you have another genre in mind?

 

I wouldn't make the game too complicated. I've often found that super ambitious game development tutorials tend to lose their steam and usually get abandoned. I would say remaking something like the Unity Nightmare Shooter would be great, but also add in a few layers. Something like adding an inventory for potions, a UI for using items, some stats on the player. Its a tutorial that's already well known by many Unity users, and seeing the process of breaking it down into proper ECS so that you can then ADD those extra modules in would be great.

 

Video tutorials always show you how to begin something and how to finish it. Really good tutorials explain the planning and purpose before getting into the execution.

Legendary tutorials do the above, but they also systematically cover most of the common errors that a noob is likely to make during the execution phase. "If this or that isn't showing up, you may need to change such and such setting." "If your results come out looking like x,y, or z, these are likely causes."

Also, encouragement. Many newbies to game dev are kids or teenagers and don't really know how to work hard, persist, etc. It's a skill like anything else. So instead of the viewer watching the tutorial, getting stumped when they can't produce the same thing, and then quitting, the ideal tutorial would remind them at the difficult parts that sometimes things are going to be a problem, take time to solve, and provide resources and motivation to get over the tougher obstacles. People teach one another many things, but there still seems to be this macho-man attitude that surrounds work and how we approach difficult things. "Suck it up!" "Work harder!" That isn't useful to most people. Most people want to do their best, but they genuinely don't know how. You may have had good parents you set you up for success, or maybe you just learned on your own, but working through complex problems isn't something that comes natural to many people but I really believe is a skill that anybody can learn.


Also, something I rarely see but would like to is a comprehensive tutorial that covers the inbetweens, specifically when making game assets. For instance, many tutorials show you how to sculpt in Zbrush, focusing more on the art than the technical side of things. Many tutorials show you how to block model in Maya or rig or whatever. But the tutorials usually start and end with that one task, and for me, as a beginner game developer, much of my difficulties are in the inbetween parts of the workflow. How you start something in one program will effect things waaay down the line, and sometimes a small mistake in the beginning is not fixable later down the line, just like in carpentry.

So for a beginner, having to start completely over just because nobody ever told you something relatively simple about the workflow in the beginning can lead to undo frustration.

 

Hang around here for a few months, participate in discussions in whatever forum you have expertise in. You'll find the same questions recurring multiple times. That's where you should focus your tutorials on.

Its what I did with my channel (link in the signature). And I think its done reasonably well.

 

I noticed Kiwasi has a video called Unity Error code ______:.

Aside from comprehensive tutorials, stuff like this is super useful. Noobie is working on something, gets an error, they have a choice of reading documentation which may be hard for them to understand at this point, or they can watch a quick video where a human explains in plain english how to fix what's broke.

Also, a note about one author on pluralsight I like alot, Justin Marshall.

His videos are usually slow enough and he usually expalisn things thoroughly enough that I don't even need to look at the video. Simple stuff like calling out the menu and submenu as you navigate, saying hot keys over and over. This makes it so that it's like somebody is just talking over my shoulder, explaining how to do something. If I miss something or get unexpected results, then i can rewind and see what I missed. For follow along, step by step guides like this, repetition is really important. Don't say something once and expect the viewer to get it.

 

Actually not doing as well as I expected. They are super cheap to make though, which means I'll probably do a few more.

The best performing videos are the ones that explain common UI tasks. Drag and drop on its own represents about 50% my channel traffic. The other UI videos make up the next 40%. Unity principles, Unity Errors and the other rats and mice make up the last ten percent.

 

Please no. These topics are done to death - and have been covered for the past 8-10 years. Unless there have been some 'new' things introduced in C# - I don't think yet another intro to C# fundamentals will ad any value to the tube sphere. Also Unity vs Unreal/Gamemaker/other less popular engine - are for indecisive individuals who won't be able to make a game anyway. Part of development is making a decision and doing it. Another "why I choose Unity over X" videos also does not add any value to anyone - cause in the end they have to choose themselves. Anyone not reviewing feature lists, workflow processes, licenses, and other relevant stuff before choosing a development platform isn't likely going to be able to choose based off a video either.

There are a ton of people doing this right now, and have been doing this for 4-5 years, including live streaming entire days of game dev on twitch. I watch a couple random videos of people doing this a couple times a month. For me its entertainment for a 10 minute break, but nothing really for learning. Idk if you'd want to be 'just another' developer making a game on youtube, but this seems like a popular thing to do.

I think to ad value - picking topics that cover most games is a great thing to show off and work with.
A couple to consider.
- Lighting for ALL (mobile with skinned characters) types of environments. Not just PC/console builds, or static baked mobile games.
- Physics for a wide variety of functions, from physics controller, to ragdolls, to ragdolls (not humanoid), puzzles, obstacles, planetary exploration, bullet physics, trajectories, explosions etc.
AI - and built in systems that can aid in this - nav mesh and - I'm out of my element here so refer to others for this.
UI - cause all games have it and - seems to be a topic that always needs helped with.
Multiplayer setups - local mp, online mp, data saving etc - again getting out of my element here.
Version controling - cause who likes loosing data.

 

I would do a full game project, broken up into videos on specific things (e.g. getting character up and running, level design, combat/whatever, AI, inventory etc etc). I don't watch random videos much on how to do things, but this is something that I might watch just for the joy of seeing an actual game come together in an organised way - and that's a good way to drive traffic and teach at the same time.

 

Getting whole complex game (not necessarily complete in the "asset" way) is the big missing elephant! Scaling game architecture from simple shooter like unity's demo or tutoriel, to a full game, is generally where the people fail to grow. My biggest lesson interacting with unity and other engine, is that knowing the basic and scaling to a full game is night and days, you might be able to do each features separately, but teh challenge is to actually make them work together, and there is little word about best practice for this.

Common point of failure I have observed:
- streaming (load and unload) terrains with saving permanent modification
- going in and out of in game cinematique
- really anything with complex interruption and resuming of various update loop, especially in a unity where there is no main update loop (can't use an update stack, can't pause the gameplay of all objects while in dialogue while keeping the ambient and dialog animation with the simple time.scale = 0).
- etc...

Basically any architectures stuff.

 

... so "how to use code tags", "how to use google", "how to do basic debug", "why 'I get an error' is not useful" and "how to explain what you're talking about to people who haven't seen your work or have any context of what you're gibbering about"? ... maybe I'm having a cynical week*


*month... year... ok fine


slightly more seriously, how to map out an idea into a design and communicate that design is often overlooked