More tutorials and complete projects

Hello,

It's a message for the Unity team and everybody can reply.
I have an idea to improve the learning process and attract more clients.

On the official tutorial page :
https://unity3d.com/fr/learn/tutorials
There is only one big complete project with animations and stuff : survival shooter.
The community on youtube made more tutorials.

I think we could have oficial tutorials about complete projects for every kind :
- 3rd person
- fps
- network
- rts
- tycoon
- race
- sport


When I choose a game engine, I look at the resources and the tutorials to see if I will be able to acomplish my objective. In the case of if I'm stuck somewhere and the scripting tutorials or the forum don't help me enough.
The Unity team made the engine (the most dificult part), so they know how to use it and can explain in details how to manage the different game logics.
And I don't think it's too expensive to give this task to an employee sometimes (one week by tutorial).


Unity is designed to make game development easy.
Proposing base mechanics with best practice to not reinvent the wheel.
I don't ask for obscure tools but projects with code that we can study/customize and assets.

A lot of people pass by the assets store to buy tools than can become obsolete.
The tutorials on youtube can be irrelevant.
Other societies sell books about Unity.
It proves that there is a high demand of tutorials by the public.


This is my humble thought.
Thank you for your attention.

 

If you just use the learn section in general eventually you'll come to realise that you can just make these games without tutorials.

 

I already used the learn section.

I talk from the beginner and client point of view.
Why the client should make all the efforts, taking longtime to learn by itselft and not be sure of its code ?
If he's not a genius at coding, he won't know how to do perfectly certain things.

Why is it bad if Unity releases more complete tutorials ?
Although some kids do it for free on youtube. It's nonsense.
And a lot of people buy tools on assets store to make the development faster or easier but these tools are not official and can become obsolete with the version changing.
It is better if we learn to create these tools with the help of Unity.

Here is a counter example, Unreal Engine shows some complete projects :
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Resources/SampleGames/index.html
Why you don't tell to Epic Games that it's unnecessary ?

Don't be snobbish please.
Because when a company creates a software, its goal is selling to everybody.

 

The entire point of those tutorials is to teach you the basics. Not to hold your hand every single step of the way through every single game you're interested in making. If someone never graduates beyond that point then they may simply not be cut out for game development.

It's completely normal and expected for people to move beyond the basics. You didn't keep crawling after you learned how to properly work your muscles and achieve sufficient balance to start walking, did you?

No. Businesses don't sell their software to everyone. Some companies will outright deny licenses to their software if you don't meet a certain required criteria. Unity and Unreal are far more willing to deal with hobbyists but they don't stand to make much if any money off of purely hobbyist developers because you aren't required to buy Unity unless you make a certain threshold.

 

I never talked about not graduating beyond that point.

I'm sure some people are interested in that, it's a resource in more.
But maybe now they will be afraid to talk because they will be seen as newbie but it's not the case.
It's looking for best practices and a good base, not reinventing the wheel.
And after we can customize, creating something more.

For example :
If I program a RTS, I will do a selection rectangle a certain way.
But there are other ways more effective to program that.

 

I don't know where you got that impression from but in my honest opinion it is a very mistaken one. We constantly are getting people on these forums, especially in the Getting Started section, that are asking for assistance learning because they never found the Unity Learn section. If they're willing to ask for assistance finding learning materials I don't see why they would be afraid to ask for assistance outside of those learning materials.

 

If you're in the business industry, maybe you just want to share easy free knowledge but you're afraid that creating a complete game become mainstream.
Because you don't have real argument agaisn't my idea. It seems like a taboo.

I know that teaching is a business, there are a lot of books etc...

 

You're acting like nobody here was ever a beginner or something. The entire purpose of the learn section is to teach you. Not primarily how to do big things like make an MMO or a soccer game, but how to do the smaller things that make up common features among all games and how to do those things in Unity. Nobody is expecting anyone to be a genius, just to be able to learn and teach themselves.

Because complete tutorials are generally a mess all around unless they're for small projects so you can get a better idea how to do things. They're a waste of resources because so few people can use them effectively and they're a pain in the ass to learn from.

Although some kids do it for free on youtube. It's nonsense.

So make sure you buy assets that have a history of decent support.

Yes, if you have all the time in the world, sure.

Why would I tell Epic Games what I think is unnecessary when I'm using the Unity forums?

 

By the way I highly recommend anyone actually interested in assisting newcomers to learn Unity take part in the official section of the forums dedicated to this. At this point in time we only have a relative few who are regularly taking part in it.

https://forum.unity3d.com/forums/getting-started.82/

If you need motivation consider that in order to teach a subject you need to be knowledgeable about it yourself. Teaching is thus a very effective form of learning and I've picked up knowledge in areas that I was not familiar with doing it.

 

Because no matter what unity does, you'll still have to spend at least a month or two learning the engine before you'll be able to fully utilize it. There's no way around it. Also, you do not need to do things "perfectly" in order to deliver a product.

If you want fast result immediately, simply hire someone else to do the work for you. I mean, you can't, for example, just buy a grand piano and expect to be able to play it if you never studied music. Same with the engine.

Because there's truckload of problems people would prefer to have fixed instead of having more tutorials. There's not that much of a difference between different genres when you know the API.

That's actually wrong. The goal is to maximize their profits, not to sell the software to everybody. In case of unity, it means making people pay for subscription.

By offering free version of unity, unity makes a bet - in the off chance of your success, they'll get cash out of it. A person who released something and doesn't simply want a "dark pro skin" for no reason, will not need tutorials anymore. They'll want bugfixes. At least that's how I see it.

One thing I'd love to have done is adding full text transcription for all existing video tutorials (because I hate video tutorials), but I don't really see much point in making complete game projects.

 

This. Epic did much the same thing themselves. They made a bet that there would be people out there capable of making successful games that normally wouldn't be able to afford the hundreds of thousands that the engine used to cost that it was worth giving away their engine and only charging royalties.

Someone who never goes beyond the learning resources though is not actually among them.

 

Making a simple game is very easy in Unity.
The goal of Unity was to make game creating accessible to the most people.

Before, it was really more difficult with C++ and OpenGL.

But when you reach a high level of features, it reassures you if you see that it's possible.
I talked before about basic stuff, it's good to learn the best practice with examples.
And for advanced stuff, for example facial animation, I don't see an oficial tutorial about that.
I have to look on the forum or on google etc.
We are used to that, imperfection. But why you don't want to change that and make it better ?

if the scripting tutorials weren't there, you would say to a guy asking for that : "look at the documentation classes and fend for yourself."

I still don't understand why you're agaisnt my proposition.
I mean : what it will do agaisn't you ? You won't loose anything. If you don't like that, you won't look at it.
Maybe the Unity team is busy at something else. But its a big company with a lot of people doing more difficult things. I think it wouldn't take too long and I don't ask for mega tutorials.

Anyway thanks for your answers. I'm very curious about Unity team's opinion.

 

If you need proof that a game is possible to be made with Unity then you only have to go to the showcase sites.

https://madewith.unity.com/
https://unity3d.com/showcase/gallery

The only people who have needed that reassurance so far though are those who haven't actually started using Unity.

Some of us already have started. I linked the appropriate forum section earlier. No one is preventing you from assisting.

 

This sounds like a lack of confidence issue rather than a Unity problem and no amount of tutorials will fix that.

Because we have the learn section which gets updated semi-frequently. And here's the thing: Unity is not here to hold your hand. You WILL have to venture outside of the Learn section eventually and do your own thing. Don't pin everything on Unity.

 

The goal of unity is to make money, as far as I'm aware.

The best practice is to stop worrying about "best practices". You need to design simplest possible solution that does what you need. Then you'll optimize it IF it is necessary. See "KISS principle" on wikipedia.

"unity facial animation" on google returns bunch of hits, leading to asset store, blog posts, and mixamo articles. This one's covered.

Because people have things to do and bills to pay, and because making tutorials is not exactly fun in many situations.

Are you willing to pay someone to make more tutorials? For the greater good or something like that. Or you could make your own tutorials, put them on youtube and attempt to earn money via some sort of monetization.

 

Making things better : try to improve the product or the oficial site by giving ideas to the Unity team.
I didn't ask you to make the tutorials.

The goal of Unity is to gain money.
And how they gain money ? If game creators use their software and succeed.

 

You are asking someone to do so though.

Simply using the software is not enough. It is entirely possible to stay within the $100,000 revenue limit and never pay for it.

 

Yes but this people are paid by the company.
They could even sell oficial books.

 

They would have to compete with all of the other people selling high quality books. From my experience we have never had a problem with recommending good books to people interested in them. Most of the time people just don't want one.

 

There are not so much high quality complete books.

 

If by this you mean there are no "Dummies Guide to Building Your MMO in Unity" books and others like it then you are correct. There are however very good books at teaching you enough of the basics that you can start making simple games and that has been more than enough in my own experiences.

Most advanced topics in book form are not specific to any one engine or language by the way. If you're searching solely for advanced programming in Unity or C# you won't find much but if you search for advanced programming techniques you'll stumble across some real gems.

Here are two quick examples.

https://www.amazon.com/Code-Complete-Practical-Handbook-Construction/dp/0735619670
https://www.amazon.com/Pragmatic-Programmer-Journeyman-Master/dp/020161622X

Likewise books covering game design do not focus on the tools necessary to make them because the topic is about learning how to design games and you can do that solely with a pencil and some paper.

https://www.amazon.com/Art-Game-Design-Lenses-Second/dp/1466598646/

 

The strength of Unity is in the community. Step outside the learn section. Do a YouTube search. You will find complete tutorials for every type of game imaginable.

For complete projects to play with, search the asset store.

Unity doesn't exist in a vacuum. The whole ecosystem around Unity is also part of Unity.

Pick me! I like making tutorials. And if someone wants to fund it, I'll make whatever you like.

 

Wrong. They gain money If game creators pay for subscription.

Uh, if people are paid "by the company", the company still has to get money somewhere.
The problem with books is that by the time they're released, they're already outdated.
Besides, why sell books when there's script reference and manual available on the web?
https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/

 

Yep BoredMormon, but I wonder why there are not more materials on the official site.
It's not a criticism, just a way of improvement.

They are lucky to have this community.
But sometimes on a youtube channel, it's imperfect because the guy will use a model and the link is broken etc... Or the code isn't optimised and it's seldom advanced.

 

Optimization isn't the goal of a tutorial unless the topic is itself optimization.

 

...

You have used the learn section right? Its totally unoptimised, encourages bad practices, and breaks almost every major release of Unity.

One of the perils of teaching beginners is you have to teach simple code first. Which often involves ignoring a best practices and optimisation.

The nature of video tutorials is they are static. So any change to the engine outdates the video. Unity's learn section is not immune to this.

 

So that's an other point of making oficial tutorials : a Unity team keep them up to date and independant (no need to buy things on assets store) and make sure it works.

 

If you want the tutorials to be actively kept up to date then you will have to make sacrifices like having fewer of them. By the way I'm not aware of any tutorials from Unity that actually require you to buy anything. The assets they use are entirely free.

 

But they don't. The Unity learn team struggle to keep the existing stuff up to date. It was almost a year (and a profitable one for me) between the release of 4.6 and the update to Roll-A-Ball. There are dozens of feature sections that are out of date or incomplete.

The only way to solve this would be to spend more money on more tutorial makers. Which has to come from somewhere.

Just because something is produced by Unity doesn't automatically make it up to date.

 

Just as a quick note this problem isn't solely restricted to Unity. Unreal was mentioned earlier so it's also worth mentioning that their tutorials tend to be out of date too.

https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?54280-Please-keep-tutorials-Up-To-Date

Or have fewer tutorials. Or have them cover far less material. Project management triangle and all that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle

 

It's easy to rationalize that Unity don't need to provide any more tutorials because you can just learn whatever you need to yourself, and since it's everything is just an extrapolation of basic c# etc then as soon as you've done your intoductory c# you're set..

The truth is that there is a huge amount to learn from bigger projects. In particular, you can get to know how to organise a lot of concurrent features at the same time. I like to think of the Uncharted 4 trailer (please don't get hung up on the graphics, it's about the millions of 'things' that are going on at the same time - just think about that scene in Unity and what it would look like in the hierarchy and the codebase!):

Do you really think nobody could learn anything from having a look at a setup like that? It's what we're lacking. Everything is taught in isolation, and people are just expected to 'take it from there'. Architecturally there are so many 'compound effects' that bringing a bunch of systems together have, and it can be very helpful to see some of the ways that they can be organised to work fluidly together. Things like delegates, interfaces, coroutines - it's all just presented as isolated, simple techniques that frankly on their own aren't particularly self-evident in their utility, and often when you never see a demonstration it just doesn't occur to you that it could be used like that.

I've had the pleasure of dealing with some big (well, medium at best really) frameworks from the store, some good and some horrific, and I learned just as much from the bad ones as the good. Just having something there of a certain complexity, where you can look through it and think about why or why not xyz was a good idea, is incredibly useful for learning. It would be good if Unity could provide some of their own, since presumably they know a fair bit about their own engine and how to use it.

I will say that Unity's learning section is fantastic in terms of what's there, and it was incredibly useful to me starting out, but at some point it just kind of stops when there is so much more that could be taught. I can't help but feel that Unity is hampered by being focused on a stellar entry experience at the cost of advanced features, example projects and learning materials.

 

I think there are two points that would help with this:

The first point would be Unity Technologies needs to develop games with their engine and services. Meaning fully complete games, similar to Paragon or Unreal Tournament that Epic makes. This would help Unity Technologies actually figure out how to use their own engine, get best cases down for use in actual tutorials for large game development in Unity.

The second point is really one we can solve as a community, a general industry standard for developing a game in Unity with frameworks built together around that point but seperate.

 

check out "cooking with unity" aka "pushypixels" on youtube
or "quill18creates"
or "bergzergarcade"
or ... theres alot more...

they usually give projects aswell
youtube is full of unity tutorials

i was gonna make unity tutorials too.. but it takes alotta planning and stuff >,>
iam really not that organized LOL

 

Bily> you're post is very interesting.
A lot of details in these AAA games are little things that make it realistic but not always important for gameplay, often graphic. And its difficult to put it together in a little engine.

Nathan> sure ! There are lot of prototypes on Unreal Engine.

Bucky> BurgZerg made a lot of tutos about scripting for an RPG (inventory system with classes etc).
But there are not great models or graphic details.
Quill made a system for an online FPS but the other stuff are not impressive.

 

Unity Technologies as a whole doesn't develop games but I have frequently seen the developers mention that they had their own personal game projects they worked on during their spare time so I'm willing to bet they actually do know how to use their own engine.

 

Some do. I've had conversations with other Unity staff that indicate they've been blown away by what can be built in Unity.

 

I know, I see that as a problem.

That's great, now they have to show it. Most of their solutions are simple and will not scale for larger games\teams and I think that's because they themselves don't have a great idea on how it should be done, I think that should change.

I love Unity and I love how generic it is, I enjoy developing editor tools and I have my own scaleable solutions but there is no reason why I had to figure most of it out on my own. Admittedly their later stuff is getting better, but I wouldn't develop a multiplayer FPS how the live training Merry Fragmas was developed.