Although I know some parts of the Unity platform well, I am not a developer or a regular user of the engine in my professional life. Over the next 2 years it is my intent to develop my practical technical skills as well as an understanding of the foundational theory of development and the business of games. This is to support one of my programme goals:
To develop enough independent development skills to make a game and understand how it works.
Whilst I have some limited engine knowledge, I have decided to start from the very beginning on the Unity Learn site, working my way through tutorials until I am ready to start experimenting without direct guidance.
I am lucky to work with some incredibly talented and generous people at Unity and have secured a mentor to support and challenge my learning as I go. I have started meeting with them once every two weeks to review progress and discuss my work. I have also created a live learnings document of concepts, how-to’s and example scripts that I intend to add to as a personal reference as I progress.
My first two weeks have been spent completing the very first Roll-a-ball project. The objective of the game is to roll a ball inside a square play area, targeting twelve rotating collectible cubes. Each time the ball collides with a cube, the cube disappears from the scene and a point is added to a visible counter. When all cubes have been collected, a message appears congratulating the player for completing the game.
Summary of progress and learnings:
- Basic editor navigation.
- Used built-in functionality to set up a simple game environment.
- Replicated example C# scripts to create the game functionality.
- Set up player input using the Unity Input System
- Created a basic user interface.
- Created a build of the game for MacOS.
Next:
- Research fundamental programming concepts – understand and describe.
- Create with Code: Getting Started (Unity Learn).
References
Unity Technologies 2021. ‘Roll-a-Ball’ in Unity Learn [online]. Available at: https://learn.unity.com/project/roll-a-ball [Accessed 12th September 2021]
Full list of figures
Figure 1. Morwenna GRIFFIN. Roll-a-Ball project: Play Area [screenshot by the creator]
morwennagriffin.com 