Most Structured Way to Learn Unity?

Hi All,

While some people like to learn by diving right in and getting their hands dirty with tutorials, my inner ocd needs to understand exactly how everything works first and prefers a much more structured, comprehensive approach.

I would love get your advice on what you think is the best way to go about this?

I initially thought the live training sessions would fit the bill nicely and started working my way through them, but after watching the first 4 sessions, I realise this isn't really going to work for me for several reasons:

1. Session 4 is about adding trees, grass, water, lens flare, skyboxes etc. As a complete beginner who can't even create a minimum viable product yet, I can't help but feel that this level of detail is unnecessary at such an early stage when many more core elements haven't yet been covered.

2. In this lesson, Mike Geig refers to a previous lesson about heighmaps which doesn't seem to exist.

3. A first person controller is used in the session with little to no explanation or background about how it works or where it comes from.

Perhaps I'm just overthinking this and all the pieces will come together naturally, but at the moment I feel a little frustrated because rather than spending time learning Unity, it feels like I need to learn how to learn Unity.

 

Are you speaking about the http://unity3d.com/learn tutorials?

Probably your best best in learning to use all the concepts and functions of Unity. Just go through each tutorial one by one. The tutorials are meant to teach you about each function of Unity even if they are unnecessary to fundamental game design. If you are more interested in fundamental game design then I suggest other readings specifically on design games.

 

Welcome!

Have you done any sort of programming before? I tend to find with code and code-related subjects that often times you just have to dive in so that you can develop that comprehensive understanding.

Variables, classes, functions, data types... These are all abstract ideas that don't exactly line up with anything we're used to dealing with in our daily life. The best way to understand them is to just use them in a simple manner, which I believe the tutorials and live sessions all do quite effectively. Once you just kinda "get" what they do, then it's appropriate to go do some deep reading and deduce how they work under the hood.

I totally get the compulsion to want to understand things to their most basic roots, but it's a difficult way to learn this stuff. And to be perfectly frank, a lot of that knowledge is unnecessary to make a great little first game!

 

Thanks for your input guys.

I was referring to the live training sessions here: http://unity3d.com/learn/live-training

Tutorials definitely have their uses, and I was planning on going through them eventually, but I guess my main worry is that if I derive all my knowledge of Unity from tuts and training sessions, then I'm going to develop some pretty huge knowledge gaps because certain elements weren't covered in the video, or because they weren't explained in sufficient detail for me to replicate later on. This is why I prefer a more fundamental approach to learning.

I'm surprised there isn't a more structured resource. The kind of thing I had envisioned was a full course along the lines of "Game Development With Unity and C#" which would cover the theory of game development and teach Unity and C# in a structured, formal way from basic to professional level.

Perhaps I'm expecting too much

I'll take your advice for now and soldier on with the live training sessions and tutorials and perhaps rethink this once I have more of a perspective.

 

You'll have to look to third parties like Udemy for any well structured course. If I recall correctly the advice given is to sign up for an account but don't do anything with the account for a few days and they will send a coupon with a discount code.

 

First and freeist is the learn section tutorials. They really do teach you everything you need to know.

If you want something more structured, try the unity certification training material. It's basically the same stuff as the learn section, but it's structured in a more linear way. I peronally wouldn't recommend spending any money on the course, but if you need structure, it's there.

 

Yep I got the unity course for 8 quid last year price of a couple pints. Really enjoyable from my standpoint.

 

related tangent: you should checkout my book Unity in Action