Day 1 — The Hero’s Journey begins
So it is that I take the first steps towards departing my old world and embarking on a new grand adventure, full of knowledge, excitement and discovery. Like Neo in the Matrix, I headed the call, took the Red Pill and peeled back the veil over reality and began my initiation into Video Game Creation.
For the first time seeing the inner workings of the games I so cherished my whole life. For better or worse I am now beginning to understand the mechanics, the programming code, the challenges and struggles that create these incredibly immersive worlds. There is no going back; now when I play games I will always view it through the lens of a Video Game Programmer…….and it’s AWESOME!
While I may be a fledgling programmer right now, deep down I sense my potential and after just a short time I know that Jonathan and GameDevHQ are the ultimate resources to learn such an amazing profession. The lessons are clear, concise and riddled with just enough challenge to make you think. I like the emphasis on no hand holding and teaching you to find the information on your own and understanding what you are doing instead of copying & pasting.
Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. ~Lao-Tzu
Today I completed the Project Setup from 2D Development, Variables and If-Then Logic sections from the C# Survival Guide before moving on to complete Create the Player in 2D Development. This was the recommended order and it really does make a big difference to follow this order. By the time I got to Creating the player I felt comfortable with the logic and syntax and breezed through the challenges.
My biggest challenges where familiarizing myself with the syntax and a couple times I had the wrong toggles selected in Unity:
- I tried making changes to the inspector when in PLAY mode and not understanding why the values were not saving.
- I somehow inadvertently unselected the LOG toggle in the CONSOLE and couldn’t understand why any of my DEBUG.LOG messages where not being displayed. This one took me 40 minutes as I kept checking my code over and over again and comparing it to Jonathan’s; I either thought that Unity/VS was buggy or I was losing my mind. Thankfully GOOGLE sorted me out!
At the end of the day seeing my little blue CUBE move back and forth and loop around was very exciting and made all those frustrations worth while. Overall a great first day and looking forward to tomorrow!
Mark
