Please stop making updates

Sure, it "helped" by spurring on discussion about that particular point, but it's a rather round-about and sub-optimal way of giving someone practical advice. Why not just directly share the conclusion you want them to reach?

I still don't know what that conclusion is, by the way. From the article you linked (which is pretty good), someone who doesn't already have your experience and perspective could easily come away with the conclusion that they should do exactly what the OP is doing - list out parts of their tools which they don't yet understand and spend time specifically learning each. Because that's "deliberate practice", right?

I don't know about you, but from my perspective that's not an ideal use of time as an overall strategy in the context of making games, for a reason I already mentioned: just learning components won't get you finishing things. To get "deliberate practice" along the way, I sometimes go out of my way to try new approaches or tools when doing things. Early on I don't think that's really a concern, though, because you don't know what you don't know. So start with some small projects, finish them, and then use that experience to start directing future, deliberate learning on the parts that were most problematic.

 

"An expert is someone who has made every possible mistake in their field." - Neils Bohr

 

Somebody wants to become an "expert" at using Unity?

• https://learn.unity.com/course/unity-game-dev-course-programming-part-1
• https://learn.unity.com/course/unity-game-dev-courses-programming-part-2
• https://learn.unity.com/course/unity-game-dev-courses-programming-part-3
• https://learn.unity.com/course/unity-beginner-fundamentals
• https://learn.unity.com/course/unity-intermediate-fundamentals
• https://learn.unity.com/course/unity-advanced-fundamentals

After that you'll know more about the subject but you won't be an expert either.

 

hm... Better start as early as possible. There's a lot to go through.

 

Well, its always better to have more options. It's not like you will use every single feature, in reality, only a handful of them will be needed for a small project(in bigger ones there are probably more people working on the team so, each person has no need to know everything ). The problem I have is that most of these new features are in alfa or beta, so I can't really use them, and every time I check if I could finally use some of new things, those are still not ready for production use.

 

I am making games sir with approach and try to put on itch for feedbacks friday.

 

Really cool and inspirational!

 

Well it is a quote from Bohr. There are only a handful of humans that can ever lay claim to his level of expertise in his field. I don't think anybody on this thread is going for quite the same level of mastery.

 

Niels is just a ordinary Scandinavian man, there is so little S*** todo here during the long dark winters so why not study/work your pants off

 

There you have it OP. Just move to Scandinavia. You'll become an expert overnight!

 

Just bear in mind that the night lasts from October until March.

 

And the birthrate is much higher from July thru January.. Just sayin'.

 

Agree definitely. The problem with that axiom is that it completely ignores the question of talent. A talented person may master something in 1,000 hours. A an untalented person may not get there in a lifetime.

Trying is still worthwhile though....

 

That's just one way of reading it. It's clear that the people sharing the advice are implying the scope of dedication necessary, not implying that if you sit and poke buttons for 10,000 hours you'll magically be an expert. You would have to be dumber than a rock to take away that.Does that need to be contested?

Just my experience, but persistence always beats talent. And the important thing is, anybody can be persistent. Don't got to start with any talent.

 

What is "talent", anyway? In my experience it's just a hand-wavy word used to not look further into things.

It's definitely valid that some people seem to pick up certain things more or less easily than others. I'm sure that some of that is effected by characteristics we're born with, but I do wonder just how much impact that has in the majority of cases.

Back when I was doing my first formal programming classes people said I was "talented", but there was nothing special about me as an individual. The fact was simply that I was the only person in the class who'd had access to a computer from before I could talk. In that case "talented" meant "had already had lots of practice".

In that context I think the idea of "talent" is actually pretty destructive. How many people compare themselves to others and then give up because they feel they lack "talent"?

 

Nobody wants to admit it, but "talent" is largely a myth as well. There are some people who will fall into a skillset quite nicely, but a lot of that is less "natural gift" and more an upbringing that has geared them towards being able to self-teach effectively. The people who get pointed at as having "natural talents" who don't have to practice are so rare that they might as well be unicorns.

What people see as "talent" is almost entirely the result of deliberate practice rather than wide-scale geared teaching.

 

I must be nobody, then, because I thought that's pretty much what I was just saying.

 

Hyperbole is a thing. Latent talent is a dominantly accepted concept.

 

There's a big difference between saying "talented people don't have to practice" and something like "talented people can accomplish more with less practice." Are people really saying the former?

For me, I don't know. Does writing a song that makes people cry really come down to "self-learning"? In my opinion no. Does completing a STEM master's really come down to self-learning? In my opinion yes.

 

There are massive swaths of people who think talent is just innate and you'll find that all of them work outside of creative fields. Go ahead and ask artists about commissioners who try and rip them off for thinking that art skills just manifest out of thin air. Things like the existence of Fiverr's creative fields almost entirely rely on the common idea that talent is innate, and this is a huge part of where the fundamental undervaluing of creative skill comes from.

This is absolutely inaccurate. If you make a song that makes people cry, it's not just a matter of doing the music emotionally until that happens. There's loads of theory behind how emotion in music is conveyed and how talented musicians have to work to make that happen. There's a youtube channel, Sideways, that goes deep into this sort of thing and how music has to use both cultural and technical concepts in order to help convey emotion, and how those same emotions can be conveyed entirely different depending on cultural backgrounds. Understanding these things on a level where you can convey them effectively is extremely about self education and exploration.

 

Talent is a shortcut word to describe all of the intangibles a person brings to learning a skill, and normally includes advantages that other learners don't have. Its an amalgamation of genetics, natural aptitude, upbringing, previous experience, transferable skills, raw intelligence, interest and willingness to work. These are all real things.

We can clearly see that some people learn some skills faster and easier than others do. These same talented people tend to reach higher levels of mastery as well. It doesn't really matter that much exactly why an individual has talent, but its important to acknowledge that this is a real phenomena.

Possible you are right. Or possible you are/were experiencing the Dunning-Kruger effect. Highly competent people tend to underrate their own competence.

Alternatively abandoning it is also destructive. I've seen people bang their head against a wall trying to accomplish a thing for years, while all the while ignoring their personal background and history. They get the idea that there is no such thing as talent, and if they just work hard enough they will succeed.

There is natural variation in everything else about humans. Height, weight, hair colour, eye colour, immune response and so on. Why then does it make sense to assume there is no natural variation in how our brains function and our ability to do tasks?

 

That's fair.

I'm more speaking of lyrics than the music itself.

But what if someone's done that without spending ages studying theory? I suppose you could say they're just innately/unconsciously understanding and replicating the theory, but...isn't that kinda talent?

This is what I'm "worried" about. To me, getting a STEM master's degree means F-all, pardon my French. But objectively I recognize that that isn't the case for most people.

And in the end I'm not sure which is better. Is it better to say "yeah I'm talented and just better than everyone else" or say "doing this didn't take any meaningful effort at all" and trivialize the struggle of people who were unable to do the same thing?

 

Again, this is... still wrong. To use a pretty analogous comparison, writers write. Writers write and get feedback and apply what they've heard from feedback, they read and study, they do all these things as a part of improving their craft. These are all ways of teaching yourself.

I have already addressed these people:

Theory is part of practice.

 

I think it is important to understand difference between subjective opinion and fact. Here we have move onto opinion and to prove points ppl use technique like 'steel manning' and 'straw manning' to give more weight to argument -> you can read more about these thing on google.

Is better not to try to argue one over other and more to point is not really on topic. But I do enjoy reading your opinions for sure.

 

Its just too darn much regression going on. They really need to get their QA ball running. Also earlier in the 5.x or 2017.x days if we found a bug, regression or not, Unity was quick fixing it, most often atleast. Now it takes a very long time, and sometimes they dont fix it at all for current version (for example 2019.3.x). Which is fine for preview stuff since its preview and not production worthy (I dont use preview more than GPU PLM to save time when testing light settings) but it have happened for none preview stuff too.

 

This is absolutely right.

The real difficulty is that engineering one's own talent is more of a question of engineering one's identity, and this is the type of thing that from very early on we are discouraged very strongly to do. As people quickly find out when they try to change, a lot of things, sometimes apparently beautiful and wonderful things, have been built on the foundation of their limitations.

 

I thought I was pretty rad. And there was evidence, because I was easily doing stuff that other people around me, who were also smart, were also struggling at. But I (hopefully!) wasn't a jerk about it because I also knew that I wasn't "better", I was just "ahead" because I'd started sooner.

Yeah, I agree that those are all real things. My point about "talent" is that by ignoring which one of those things is being referred to it is indeed perpetuating an unrealistic picture of the world.

My fellow students thinking I was just "talented" would have been, at best, demoralising. It looked like I was putting in little effort and grasping stuff that others didn't find easy. (Which isn't to knock them. If it were easy they wouldn't need a class to learn it, right?) In reality I was putting in just as much effort, but I'd front-loaded 90% of it over multiple years before the class even started.

And I bet that in the interveining years, as their amount of practice caught up with mine, that some of them will now be better than I am. And they may have got there with fewer overall hours, too, because their formally educated hours were probably better than my self-taught ones.

But calling it "talent" still isn't helpful.

I'm never going to be an astronaut. (Lets imagine, for the sake of argument, that there were plenty of job openings.) This isn't because of any mystical x-factor I just wasn't born with. It's for (at least) two specific reasons - I've never had an interest in learning the stuff that leads you to being an astronaut, and I've never taken more than cursory care of my body. If someone decides early enough that they want to be an astronaut they can identify the specific things that make it possible and invest in them to make it more likely. They can get fit, and they can learn math and physics and chemistry, and they can learn to fly.

But they can't invest in "being talented". Calling it "talent" is just obfuscating useful information with fluff.

 

I think you're confusing a once-off result with a skill, there. And if you can consistently write different songs that make people cry then, in most cases, I would assume that you developed that ability by writing songs, seeing how people respond, tuning them until you get the response you want, and eventually figuring out which things lead to that response.

Which is exactly "self-learning".

 

Update is fine, i like update.

 

Many of these features are DOTS related and most people dont use DOTS in their game, so they dont need to learn it. Why would you think you need to learn every single feature? What matters is completing games and you will likely realize during development what are the things that you need to learn.