4 ms·

> I'm trying to learn unity and game development as well. My day job is salesforce integrations, and wow I'm finding game development mindbogglingly hard. What

> I'm trying to learn unity and game development as well. My day job is salesforce integrations, and wow I'm finding game development mindbogglingly hard. What are you finding difficult? It's hard to make recommendations without a good idea of where you're stuck. My general advice, however, would be to just make things. Figure out a mechanic you want to implement, find any resource that describes how to implement it, implement that mechanic, and then move to the next thing. It's much more valuable to just build things and figure out how the systems interact as you go than it is to try and get a bunch of theory out of the gate, especially if you're not building your own engine.

stuckinhell 5y ago
It seems like there are a lot of ways to do things which seems overwhelming to a new user. Everyone has different opinions on how to approach things in the books, videos, and tutorials I've gone through. For example some people like to code custom components heavily in c# including animation transitions, but others highly recommend not doing that. Also many tutorials and examples are too toyish and are missing practical concerns like cross controller compatibility, and other real world concerns. I've got some very simple 3d games working, but I'm missing how to take them further feature wise and make them closer to "real games". I'd really like a resource that's very opinionated and pragmatic for independent game development.
- hedgewitch 5y ago
  > Also many tutorials and examples are too toyish and are missing practical concerns like cross controller compatibility, and other real world concerns. Don't worry about "real world concerns" until you have stuff that works at all. You're not building a winning product on your first try. > I'd really like a resource that's very opinionated and pragmatic for independent game development. Sounds like you're finding a lot of very opinionated resources. :) However, there is no one "pragmatic" resource in game development. The pragmatic solutions are scattered about. Not to mention that, as you are already aware, there are lots of ways to do things. You just have to pick one and run with it.
  - stuckinhell 5y ago
    Just to clarify, I have stuff that works, but not in a rigorous software engineering kinda of way. Yes, I'm finding lots of opinionated resources, but not informed opinions from experienced game developers/software engineers. Instead I'm getting lots of non expert, new to game dev, or new to programming opinions. When I follow them, I immediately run into an issue, that requires extremely in-depth thinking and usually a different architecture. It all just feels half-baked. Though I suspect I'm heavily spoiled by the fantastic salesforce learning ecosystem.
    - hedgewitch 5y ago
      Yeah, that's the thing - the people who do have the experience largely either don't share (heavily introverted/low social presence overall, takes too much time to write blog posts, open source various efforts with poor documentation) or can't share (proprietary knowledge). Most of what you're going to find is low quality. The reality is that, if they're not career programmers who have spent x amount of years at a AAA developer, the code is probably bad. Even if they have, there's a chance that the code is bad. Most of what you're going to find is definitely of the "if it works, we're done" variety (part of this has to do with the time and effort that it takes to make games in general). If you want "rigorous software engineering," you really have to look at formerly commercial (or even still commercial) games that have been open-sourced and try and figure things out from there. Good learning materials are just hard to find. That's why I said just build stuff. You build it, you apply whatever optimizations to the structure or code itself, and you learn good practices through experience.

stuckinhell 5y ago

It seems like there are a lot of ways to do things which seems overwhelming to a new user. Everyone has different opinions on how to approach things in the books, videos, and tutorials I've gone through. For example some people like to code custom components heavily in c# including animation transitions, but others highly recommend not doing that. Also many tutorials and examples are too toyish and are missing practical concerns like cross controller compatibility, and other real world concerns. I've got some very simple 3d games working, but I'm missing how to take them further feature wise and make them closer to "real games". I'd really like a resource that's very opinionated and pragmatic for independent game development.

hedgewitch 5y ago
> Also many tutorials and examples are too toyish and are missing practical concerns like cross controller compatibility, and other real world concerns. Don't worry about "real world concerns" until you have stuff that works at all. You're not building a winning product on your first try. > I'd really like a resource that's very opinionated and pragmatic for independent game development. Sounds like you're finding a lot of very opinionated resources. :) However, there is no one "pragmatic" resource in game development. The pragmatic solutions are scattered about. Not to mention that, as you are already aware, there are lots of ways to do things. You just have to pick one and run with it.
- stuckinhell 5y ago
  Just to clarify, I have stuff that works, but not in a rigorous software engineering kinda of way. Yes, I'm finding lots of opinionated resources, but not informed opinions from experienced game developers/software engineers. Instead I'm getting lots of non expert, new to game dev, or new to programming opinions. When I follow them, I immediately run into an issue, that requires extremely in-depth thinking and usually a different architecture. It all just feels half-baked. Though I suspect I'm heavily spoiled by the fantastic salesforce learning ecosystem.
  - hedgewitch 5y ago
    Yeah, that's the thing - the people who do have the experience largely either don't share (heavily introverted/low social presence overall, takes too much time to write blog posts, open source various efforts with poor documentation) or can't share (proprietary knowledge). Most of what you're going to find is low quality. The reality is that, if they're not career programmers who have spent x amount of years at a AAA developer, the code is probably bad. Even if they have, there's a chance that the code is bad. Most of what you're going to find is definitely of the "if it works, we're done" variety (part of this has to do with the time and effort that it takes to make games in general). If you want "rigorous software engineering," you really have to look at formerly commercial (or even still commercial) games that have been open-sourced and try and figure things out from there. Good learning materials are just hard to find. That's why I said just build stuff. You build it, you apply whatever optimizations to the structure or code itself, and you learn good practices through experience.