Unity from Cube One

Just a little vocab lesson:

Think of the Box Collider as the object’s skeleton. When it’s activated nothing can go through it, if it’s not checked it’s like a ghost.

The Mesh Renderer is like the skin. Makes the object visible and pretty :)

That’s all!

Hey all! (literally no one reads this blog) ...especially not since I’ve been MIA for a few months. Sorry about that, but I got very busy and on top of it I was feeling a bit helpless so I stopped practicing Unity for a while. 

In the meantime I got a new job as head of video production at a VR startup that is building a 360 Social Media Platform. I’m producing 360 videos there and I’m working with an awesome Unity Developer who was gracious enough to read this blog and see that I needed a little help. 

He introduced me to a web series called Breakfast With Unity, playlist here:

We meet any day I’m not shooting and do at least 20 minutes of Unity every work day. We have gotten through 2 videos now, one to make the snake for the game snake and another to make fireworks.

At the end of the Fireworks tutorial, Danny was checking with me to make sure I sent him the code. I didn’t really understand why he would want my project but that’s when I had a mini breakthru! 

Danny wanted my files for his arsenal of code!

Imagine you’re a model train builder. You would have tiny trees, toy people, and little houses stashed in your house for a rainy day. Developers collect code in the same way.

You can collect a bunch of different codes and re-use them. You can also join forces and collaborate with others to build something. For example, if I build the explosion and someone else builds the firework launching in the air, we can combine those assets and make a virtual firework show. We can also save them in a database so that if we later want to make a scene of fireworks at a park, we only have to copy them into a new project instead of starting from scratch every time. Then we can take some old virtual grass textures and tree models we have laying around, set down some virtual picnic blankets, and we can play the Star Spangled Banner while we short cut our way to success!

As with everything in this blog, this is probably completely obvious. But to someone with absolutely no experience this was an “A-ha” moment. If I put in grunt work now, I later would only have to piece things together and add little flourishes to make unique spaces with recycled 1s and 0s.

NOTE: Will not run in Chrome

Once your game is made you can upload it to the web! 

Make sure that Unity installed in the default location and that the folder is called Unity. You can run the download assistant again and uncheck everything (including the editor) apart from the modules you need (”WebGL Build Support”).

Click “File>BuildSettings”

Then drag your Game from the “Assets folder” in the “Project” module into “Scenes to Build” (pictured below)

Once you have everything ready to go, click “Player Settings” in the Inspector and make the... Default Screen Width 800 Default Screen Height 600 With a Black Background or “default” depending on version of Unity

Once you’ve entered that information click “Build and Run” and save it as the title and include “web build v.01″ so you don’t confuse it with other files.

Then you’re going to Upload it to GameBucket.IO

First you need to goto your file and compress it, like so:

Now you have a zip file.

Gamebucket.io won’t load on Chrome unfortunately, so you’re gonna have to open it on Safari or Explorer

Drag your .zip file into the “Upload” button and viola! Your game will start automatically. Make sure you copy the URL because it is the only time it will be given to you.

This also is only good for 30 days.

So gang, I created my first real game. Wow. Wowowow.

It’s not much, but it’s a fun start in to the world of first person gaming. 

Text Adventure Games

The first creative thing we’re learning about in this course is writing text based adventures. This is essentially a glorified flow chart. Or as it is sometimes known, a choose your own adventure.

I’ve gotten through 2 sections of the Udemy course so far and I’ve created 1 guess the number game! My biggest headache has been still been syntax errors. A few misplaced brackets can be waste hours* of precious learning time.

The Udemy course uses Monodevelop but my friend Toli said Monodevelop is like a “bucked of sadness”, so we can’t have that.

Download Visual Studio Community here: https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/

It’s been almost an entire month since I’ve updated on here. I’d apologize but I’m pretty sure no one is reading this blog yet. 

I have to admit I felt a little bit conflicted about downloading a course in regard to this blog. When I started blogging I was hoping to offer a solution on how to learn Unity on your own for free. I think this information should be free to anyone of any economic status and some people simply can’t afford an online course, even at $10. (Think global.)

I decided to go on with it because coding doesn’t come naturally to me and a structured course will be the best way for me to stick with it. As you’ve seen so far, I’ve gone down a lot of rabbit holes that lead to nowhere and I’ve already wasted hours just searching for what to do next.

I’m hoping that reviewing the course, explaining it’s structure, and showing how I’m learning will still help anyone find their own way, even if it’s not exactly how I am doing it. 

What I can say is that if you can afford the course there are a lot of benefits that will save you a lot of time, and you should buy it! Split the cost with a friend, learn together, or learn on your own with the message board they offer. It really is fantastic so far. 

If you want the course and can’t afford it, contact the creator Ben Tristem. If he’s willing to offer it on sale for $10 maybe he would be willing to do a discount for you if you explain your situation.

I hope you download it so we can continue on this path together!

I found this post on reddit that I was very impressed by. The redditor (EscapeDoodland) had only been practicing Unity for a few months and the game he developed was really simple and super cool!

I asked him for some recommendations and he said this guy Ben Tristem was a great teacher with very helpful Udemy courses. I checked him out and his courses are on sale for only $10 each! So I got this one:

https://www.udemy.com/unitycourse/learn/v4/overview

Bottomline: Your code has to be 100% correct. You can not have even one dash in the wrong place. More details, examples and tips below:

So, if you’re like me, you don’t know anything about this stuff. So you may spend hours googling and doing tutorials over and over again just because you’re ignorant.

Luckily, I’m home for Christmas and my dad is a database administrator. So he probably heard me recording my last, pathetic video and decided to pop into my room.

Here is a photo of the error I was getting:

Since I’m almost completely blind doing this, I was troubleshooting this error message the only way I knew how, which was copy pasting it into google. But it was specific, and I wasn’t getting any answers and didn’t understand why. 

My dad looked at it for 2 seconds and was able to fix it and he doesn’t even use C#. He explained that you have to have identical code. So he held up the tutorial screen from the Roll The Ball tutorial and compared it to my code:

My code:

Tutorial:

If you are the type of person to pay good attention to detail, you may notice that these are not identical. If you’re like me, you may look at these and think, “meh, close enough.”

If you continue to be like me, you will not ever roll you’re dumb ball over your lousy plane. So I’m sorry to say this, but if we plan to learn Unity, we have no choice but to pay better attention to detail.

Here is the discrepancy:

Me:

Tutorial:

These two brackets could have forced me to start the entire tutorial over just out of ignorance.

There were clues there though, that if I had known better, could have saved me time. Here are a couple ways to tell if you have bad code:

RED ZIG ZAG UNDERLINE!

When there was an error, part of the code had a red zig zag underline, similar to when you spell something wrong. This indicates the the code is incorrect. Once the code was fixed, the line went away.

BRACKET BUDDIES!

Brackets (thats: { ) in C# must have a pair.  There will never be one by itself. 

When you put your curser in front of your bracket, it will highlight it’s matching pair in orange (above). If you are missing a bracket, it will pick a pair that is incorrect. This may make it more obvious when one is solo.

This is slightly more difficult to determine if you’re not familiar with coding, but it’s a good thing to know as you learn.

Ok, ok, I’ll roll the damn ball: 

I found this link on a forum, and of course, google has the best ways to do anything, so naturally they’re trying to make it easy for people to learn how to develop so they can make cardboard a better product … but only if you have an Android phone or DayDream.

Fug.

Cool. Well you can use it in case you don’t have an iPhone:

Start Here: Google’s Cardboard Development Portal

So earlier today I decided to try Unreal, but guess what I can’t because I have a 2011 Macbook Pro. When I tried to run Unreal Engine 4 I got this error message:

I wrote this post on reddit for help: https://www.reddit.com/r/unrealengine/comments/7heatm/opengl_not_supported_mac_error_message/

Now I have to find someone to help me do this:  https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Metal_Rendering_API

Posting this on here because it was VERY hard to find an answer. Hopefully this helps someone else.

After finishing the tutorial from my last post, I was feeling good about building a simple world with a camera. Time to keep going. As I was searching for a new tutorial I clicked a “Unity vs Unreal Engine” video. 

I had default decided to learn on Unity because it is the most common program. But switching to learn on Unreal Engine sounds very tempting.

It seems to be that Unity is good for complex game play and 2D systems. While nothing compares to the graphics from the Unreal Engine. To learn Unity, you also have to have an understanding of the coding language C#, where in Unreal it seems you may never even need to learn coding because of the Blueprint feature. 

I worked at a virtual reality company called VR Playhouse so I decided to reach out to some friends and ask what they thought. They know my personality and they know that I am interested in creating beautiful, story-based, games rather than complex game play.  My friend Ian said: “Unity will be easier to learn and prototype inside, you’ll also be able to use more pre existing assets.  Unreal is better if you already know 3D and want to make photorealistic stuff.  I’d say Unity- they have more of the market and people are constantly looking to hire Unity developers so you’ll have a great chance of picking up temp work when you need it.”

My friend Toli said: “Both will present technical challenges, for pure look development I think Unreal is slightly easier for initial look, but I learned it first so I'm biased.  For simple interaction Unity is easier for non-first person shooter style experiences. I'd pick one and dig into it. Both have active communities and great tutorials. Unreal let's you get to pretty faster, so if that's your goal is a great tool.”

As I talked more to both of them, and showed them examples of the type of work I’d like to make they both agreed that Unreal may be the program for me.   Ultimately this seemed like the best advice for moving forward: The first couple projects in either engine will be exploratory, I would jump into Unreal follow a tutorial and kick out  a simple VR project then do the same in Unity. Keep a log of the things that you like and what causes you trouble.

password: unity

Welcome to UNITY FROM CUBE ONE!

Good Intro for People who have no real Idea why they're learning Unity, but deep down they know they should:

I watched Episode 22-24

Getting Acquainted with Unity 5