New to Unity and Game dev, not to dev, sharing code

Hi there All,

I've recently started to play around in Unity (I'm new to C#, but familiar with Java, and development, having been a developer in some way most of my professional life (20 years now...), and a tinkerer most of my life), with an initial "Ultimate Goal" in mind for what I want to create and publish first. My first real published game will not be overly ambitious, but definitely doable in a matter of days/weeks for any seasoned game developer, or for somebody that just ends up slapping together purchased or downloaded libraries from the asset store or elsewhere. I want to learn game development properly, so don't want to just use some libraries off the shelf to achieve a final result, I want to learn, not try to push out a product and try to make money off of it, that's a nice-to-have, not the reason for doing this. (Game) development is my passion, so that's where it's at at the moment.

That being said, I do recognise the value of community in these endeavours, and as I've watched many, many hours of tutorial videos, and read many, many a forum and blog post, I've decided to give some back at the same time. As I go on, and find that I am writing a script or class that could be used as a utility class in any given project, I am committing it to my github repository and blogging about it on my blog.

I've only done two classes so far, one for putting a tiled background onto a plane, and optionally letting it rotate (nice for a 2D background).
The second class is one I wrote while writing a Tetris clone (for personal use and learning only, no intention of releasing it onto any app store or anything, I am just doing it to "see if I can"), it's the script I use to make the tetris block drop bit by bit down the screen.

You can see the classes here:
http://github.com/AubreyKilian/AdventuresInUnity
and if you want to read a bit more about them, you can read about it on my blog's Unity category here:
http://www.dociletree.co.za/cat/unity

Comments and corrections and critique are most welcome, positive or negative, be honest. I'm here to learn, and teach if I can, so if I am doing something wrong, or there are better ways of doing it, please feel free to let me know.

Thanks for reading this far
-Newt

 

Hi, I don't know if you're looking for any other learning materials, but the book I'm writing is targeted exactly at people like you: experienced programmers who are new to Unity.

http://www.manning.com/hocking/

 

Thanks, I'll check it out once it comes out. As with a lot of other people, my budget for spending on learning Unity and sundry is rather low/non-existent, so I end up trawling Youtube and the forums for learning materials for myself. That being said, having some sort of reference book handy would definitely be a great thing to have.

The one thing I do seem to not be able to find though, is a a "next step" kind of process, for people that are comfortable with the Unity interface and scripting, and can do a simple project etc. but want to now delve deeper into Unity, learn more about Quaternions and Lerps and Eulers etc etc etc. (Yeah, I don't see those things as "Beginner" level stuff )

 

Yeah, we (my editors and I) have been kinda tossing around what level to target the material at. For example, those three specific terms are defined in this book, but of those three only Eulers gets a really in-depth explanation with diagrams.

Or another example: I drew multiple diagrams to explain raycasting in-depth, but I don't really use other complex aspects of Unity's physics and collision detection.