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Swords and Shovels --- where's the SUPPORT???

Discussion in 'Editor & General Support' started by RobG88, Jul 17, 2018.

  1. RobG88

    RobG88

    Joined:
    May 28, 2015
    Posts:
    28
    Not sure where this should be posted, but somebody has to take ownership for Swords and Shovels!

    With today's Unity striving to set the bar so high and more often than not, achieving those high marks, the Swords and Shovels training at Pluralsight is the antithesis of all things professional and high quality.

    In Oct 2017, things started with a bang, we were given 10 introductory courses which took us from Unity editor fundamentals, scripting, animation and physics and exposed us to navigation, materials, lighting, audio and UI. Not a bad start, but honestly, some of those "teachers" were just BLAH. Sadly, the only real gem here comes from, if you were impressed with Joy Horvath as I was, I thought she was the shining star of the bunch, and you searched her name, you'll find that she actually did a second course for Swords and Shovels: Designing Game Puzzles in Unity. It's what all these courses should have strived to be. Instead of taking the student thru a half-baked course, Joy really brings it all together, IMHO, in an extremely professional manner.

    In May/June 2018, the next round of programming courses dropped -- these were original promised for Jan/Feb. These 6 new courses: Unity Game Dev Courses: Programming are where the S*** truly flies into the fan. I have to say, if the plan was to screw this training up, you couldn't have done a better job!

    I don't know where the miss is here, either Pluralsight or Unity trainers or maybe more likely, the Project Manager, completely F***ed this up. The one thing I can absolutely guarantee, is that NOBODY, not a one, quality tested these courses! EACH and EVERY COURSE has missing assets. Others have missing assets and missing videos. And NO SUPPORT on Pluralsight, dozens and dozens of questions for each course go unanswered. These courses were published, and the trainers walked away.

    If you go to the sixth published course and download the exercise files, instead of the typical Unity Asset file, with missing code and assets, you’ll get the ASSETS directory and all the code, unfortunately, this ‘finished’ code is, more times than not, is different from the code shown by the trainer – how can that be??? Variable names are different, conditional statements added in the video, yet not in the code. WTF???

    With so many means of sharing code these days, you'd think this training would be a PERFECT TEACHING opportunity to use a code sharing site, so beginners can understand pushing commits and how to get them and use them for check points when stepping thru the videos. I'm assuming the code wasn't supposed to be publicly shared, but not having the ACTUAL code used in the training videos and a means of checking the code is just another major miss - check out some of the people at Udemy, they REALLY do it right and it's all about the students.

    In July 2018, we're given 2 additional courses on Game Design fundamentals, they're cool! Listening to Joshua reflect on the beginnings of Swords and Shovels, prototyping, story … something that should have been, I don't know, courses 1 and 2 back in September 2017. And, I must ask, with all the talk on game design docs, how about providing the template and one or two revisions of the Swords and Shovels version.

    Unity Training people, you want good honest feedback about your next round of training or about other courses, hit me up, I'll test the published courses and provide feedback so the rest of the community doesn't suffer.

    Swords and Shovels should have been an amazing epic piece of training, but right now with all the problems it's borderline garbage.
     
    JACLEMGO and Peter77 like this.
  2. Matthew-Schell

    Matthew-Schell

    Joined:
    Oct 1, 2014
    Posts:
    238
    hey,

    Sorry to hear you've had a bad experience. I will pass this feedback along to the folks on our education team.

    best,
    Matt
     
    karl_jones likes this.
  3. NealEdu

    NealEdu

    Unity Technologies

    Joined:
    Jan 26, 2018
    Posts:
    3
    Hi there,

    I’m sorry that you had a negative experience with Unity Game Dev Courses on Pluralsight. We appreciate you taking the time to provide feedback as it is something we take very seriously.

    I and the Unity Education Team have discussed your feedback with Pluralsight to review the quality control processes that we use within both of our companies to ensure the high quality of content in this series of courses. To address the specific issues that you mentioned:
    1. Missing or incomplete exercise files - We acknowledge there have been issues with the exercise files in the past, and have recently taken steps to catch issues before courses are pushed live. The editorial staff at Pluralsight now closely review the exercise files for each course. In addition, they have implemented a peer review process in which experienced instructors review other instructors’ courses to vet the learning experience. That said, from time to time we do miss things. The Pluralsight editor, Thomas, would love to speak with you directly about your experience to identify and solve any specific issues that you had with the project files, or any other issues with the courses. Please let me know if you would be willing to speak with him and I can connect you.

    2. Variability in instructor and course quality - One’s response to a given instructor can be very personal and subjective. However, we have put in place a robust vetting and quality control process. On the Pluralsight side, each course is evaluated against technical standards, like audio and video quality, as well as pedagogical standards like instructor organization and presentation. For the Unity Game Dev Courses, Unity instructional designers and subject matter experts also review each video for the accuracy of the Unity material presented and the overall learning quality. We do believe that we could place more emphasis on the latter in future reviews, and plan to do so in the future. In addition, course performance and ratings are closely monitored after the course is live. Poorly rated courses will be addressed, and poorly rated instructors may not be invited to create content in the future.

    3. Responses to Course Discussions - It is Pluralsight policy for instructors to actively monitor and respond to discussions, and the Pluralsight support team provides a second set of eyes. Each instructor’s cadence of review and communication style can be different. Please contact Pluralsight support if you find examples of critical comments not being addressed by instructors, or for any other course content issues: support@pluralsight.com
    You also offered to share your feedback on future Unity courses. We’d be happy to take you up on that, as we have many in the pipeline and always value detail-oriented reviewers. I will follow up with you about that separately.

    Thanks again for your feedback.

    Neal
    Education Product Manager
     
  4. synonym11

    synonym11

    Joined:
    Oct 28, 2018
    Posts:
    2
    Where are the files for the Unity Navigation Fundamentals course? In one of the first videos he says "open the project we supplied to you". Open it from where? I downloaded the overarching files from the unity fundamentals course. That's the only download remotely related to this course and it's not in there. I've been scouring the site and internet for an hour and the closet I've gotten is a paywall on the pluralsight website.
     
    loxrie likes this.
  5. Berir

    Berir

    Joined:
    Mar 23, 2013
    Posts:
    55
    these courses are total mess, and no support , I am loosing my mind trying to figure these out... for example missing scripts, old files , not fixed errors, incomplete information, for example they insist you can do this in any order, that is not true, example … I tried doing "Creating a Character Inventory System in Unity" by Lisa Walkosz , she gave us 3 script to import as well as project link... and then just asked us to paste it in , a very lazy way to teach … you would not have known where to start if you were to design this yourself... But worse part is … I kept getting errors but could not figure out to save my life what was wrong , it looked as if I was missing some files or some undeclared Vars... turns out I was right, in another course I learned later on we need to create InventoryEntry class, she does not include nor ever mention … as well as some fixes that have been in corrected in other curses, problem is these errors are in files she does not include yet we must have them , She obviously does have them but did not tell us about it...because some of these files are not part of direct subject yet they throw an error... I really love what this course is trying to do and teach but it is done horribly … some instructors are really good some not so … and worse part is I have no idea where to get help because no one is replying to those questions I posted directly in course files
     
    JohngUK likes this.
  6. respectyoda

    respectyoda

    Joined:
    Apr 27, 2018
    Posts:
    11
    Not all of the courses are a total mess. If you go this link, this tells you the order you should do the courses. Lisa Walkosz is definitely the worst instructor out of all those who taught in the Swords and Shovels courses. Like you said, she failed to explain about the InventoryEntry class among many other things. Pluralight needs to get someone else to redo the "Character Inventory System" course. But in the interim, you will need to use problem solving skills to get things working.

     
  7. xerion99

    xerion99

    Joined:
    Jul 19, 2020
    Posts:
    1
    idk if anyone else has had this problem, but right when u download the swords and shovel demo project, there is already an ambiguous error in the MinDrawer.cs code. its pretty frustrating as this is a course that i really want to work with. if anyone has any idea on how to fix this error please let me know. As i cant even progress in the course without finding a remedy for that error
     
    Last edited: Jul 30, 2020
  8. Valjuin

    Valjuin

    Joined:
    May 22, 2019
    Posts:
    481
    See JeffDUnity3D post in this thread:

    Error after Unity scene load - Unity Forum
     
    xerion99 likes this.
  9. Berir

    Berir

    Joined:
    Mar 23, 2013
    Posts:
    55
    Believe it or not I actually managed to finish the course from the start to end, it was a very stressing task, some were easier to follow then others but at the end I did managed to figure it all ... the only thing missing is the final multiplayer part which is not on here ... it has been only available via plural website