Unity Tutorials Video Only

Is it just me or could Unity benefit from text based tutorials alongside their video tutorials?

I find video kind of 1 dimensional, what I mean is that you have to watch an entire video to see it's content but if it's content is written out as text and graphics I can parse/scroll through it in 2 dimensions?!

Anyway I think even a basic bullet point text based step by step follow up with graphics could import information faster than a video?!

Or an interactive WebGL slideshow made in Unity?

 

I think having both available is usually best. I agree that text-based is usually the way that I swing. I have no fear of reading and enjoy being able to peruse a tutorial at my own pace. But I also know that there are a lot of people who prefer videos, and seem to learn better when they are hearing someone else's voice. A video tutorial at the top of a page, with a text break-down/guide underneath it, is very keen.

 

Agreed. Not a fan of video tutorials.

 

But it this case the videos are really simple. Pretty much the same level of details as the documentation for each of the components.

 

My point is that text with diagrams is easier to scan through than a video.

I'm not saying that the video should be removed, just that it could be supplemented with text and graphics.

In the classic web jargon you could even view a tutorial video as temporal friction, the video takes time to play through and this could deter people from learning new skills.

Where as text and images can be quickly scanned and any new or interesting ideas spotted and learned.

Note that the text could have links to relevant time points in the video.

 

There are lots of text based tutorials, they're called books.

 

Sometimes video is better, sometimes text. Project Survival Shooter has both, so at least some Unity Learn content gives you a choice.

 

We were recently discussing the topic of video versus text in the Teaching forum. Someone who makes tutorials as their full-time job weighed in on the discussion as well.

 

Text-based tutorials would certainly be easier to correct down the road. How many of the currently "broken" tutorials (ie due to removal of quick property accessors) could be corrected within a matter of moments if they were text-based?

 

Is there an implicit assumption here that these text-based tutorials must be free (and therefore books don't qualify), or do people really not see books as text-based tutorials?

 

Books are even more difficult to update than online video-based tutorials. I almost never recommend using a book for material that is subjected to semi-frequent changes.

 

So, who's paying for constantly updated online text-based tutorials that presumably would need to cover every aspect of Unity to be useful to anyone?

 

I never suggested they had to be free. I merely suggested that enclosing it within a printed media is less than ideal compared to the alternatives such as digital video and text resources.

 

My comment about who's paying was more suggesting a reason why such resources don't exist, and probably never will. No one is willing to pay for it, at least not enough people to make it happen.

 

There are alternatives to being paid upfront for resources. One of the biggest reasons why we have so many video tutorials is due to YouTube making it very easy to upload videos, attach advertisements, and receive payments.

Alternatives for text-based tutorials are typically more involved. A system such as YouTube may do wonders for improving this, but right now our options are to either create ebooks for distribution through Amazon, Digital River, etc or handle hosting them ourselves.

Catlike Coding is an example of a self-hosted text-based tutorial resource that requests donations through Patreon.

https://www.patreon.com/user.php?v=catlikecoding

 

I have skin in this game. I have some text-based tutorials with embedded videos on my website. I think it's the best format, providing the advantages of text and video. So far my free introductory tutorials have been downloaded a few times, and my paid tutorials not once. I'm asking a few dollars, probably less than the cost of a cup of coffee for most people.

You might say that they're no good, but my Youtube channel has 1200 subscribers and nearly 120000 views overall, so I know that a reasonable number of people like my stuff.

 

You have to take competition into account. I've taken the opportunity to examine two of your site's tutorials. The most obvious first choice was the introductory and the other being a purchased copy of "C# for Unity" Lesson 05.

After reading over the introductory lesson I had a reasonable assumption going into the paid lesson and it turned out to be entirely correct - your tutorials are very lackluster. The content is very limited and covers a very limited subject. If there were supposed to be videos embedded, they did not work viewing the PDFs through Firefox's internal viewer.

The only visual content appeared to be images (or maybe the viewer cannot handle embedded videos and simply showed the first frame). Either way the quality was very low on them to the point where the text was very blurry and hard to read.

Your approach to the subject is rather bizarre too as nowhere in "C# for Unity" do you actually need Unity. At least not for the current tutorials that are available. Those APIs you used could have very easily been replaced with Microsoft APIs. You may as well have made them with Visual Studio Express and aimed them at everyone learning C#.

Going back to the topic of competition, take a good look at the tutorials available from Catlike. His tutorials are positively massive by comparison and far more in-depth. Are you really surprised that yours are not selling? Because frankly I'm not.

http://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/

Brackeys has almost as many subscribers as you have views. He and others like him are your primary competition.

https://www.youtube.com/user/Brackeys

 

I certainly agree with this. My earlier comment looks out of place re reading it. But my point was many of the basic tutorials in the learn section are pretty much equivalent to the text in the manual. That said transcripts of all I the learn videos would be useful.

For community based tutorials videos definitely pay better then text. I've built both in the past. Videos are also probably slightly easier to build.

But the learn section ones are funded by Unity. These can be in whatever format Unity's customers want. Diverting some if the resources from new videos to new text tutorials could easily be done.

All that said the type of person that wants text tutorials can normally figure things out pretty well from the docs.

 

Yes, I suppose we should be asking for better documentation rather than actual tutorials.

 

It's good to get some real feedback. Clearly a few issues to be addresssed. Most of my time and energy is going elsewhere at the moment however. Thanks for taking the time (and money) to offer a genuine critique.

 

Were those images supposed to be videos? I'd recommend bundling any videos into an archive with the chapter PDF.

 

You need to view the pdf in Acrobat Reader, although I have had success with IE. I put that warning on my latest series but forgot to update the instructions for the C# tutorials.

 

I'm not completely against videos it's just that the vast majority are so poorly done. Often videos of a text editor mindless meandering. Just capturing the screen and doing something is real proper tutorial in my mind. It should planned. Often very limited explanation, or reasonings. Rarely edited. And the main is that many feel like they were don't by people were doing something the first time. Many offer poor/invaluable knowledge and/or do things in the "wrong" way. I have yet to find any decent quality beyond the Unity ones. They are clear concise and too the point.

I give weekly classes and in summer I give workshops. Technically, both are designed "new users". The weekly ones are most folks who new and may have basic technical skills, the longer workshops are designed for highly experienced developers who are new to Unity (those are more about mapping concepts to their placing in unity)

In both cases, the first thing I tell new students is to NOT view unity tutorials on the web, stick to the ones at Unity. (most have already figured this out on their own. It is largely a wasteland of noobs leading noobs to poor choices.

Digitaltutors has nothing recent (or rather nothing recent that is any good). Gnomon has some useful stuff. Otherwise, I am at loss for decent stuff out there.

 

Brevity is a key focus when I make videos. No need for anyone to watch me make mistakes, run through long debugging sections, or restructure my code half way through.

I typically take the approach of asking the entire unity concept once, with no recording. Then I make it again with screen recording. Then all the fluff gets edited out, anything that's not essential, including every typo, gets cut. As does any thinking time. Finally I record audio.

It takes time doing it this way. But the result ends up better then just straight out recording my coding sessions.

Then again, there are still things I know need improving. Most notably adding code repositories, adding text companions, and getting a better recording studio to clean up my audio.

So far my tutorials are more reliable money earners then my games. Shovels for miners and all that. Of course I can turn up to my day job for about fifteen minutes and beat the total revenue of my best video.

 

Where are yours?

 

I feel like Zak Parrish, who previously worked at 3D Buzz but appears to be at Epic Games now, had a decent series covering the fundamentals of Unity's editor. It is quite a bit out of date now though.

https://www.3dbuzz.com/training/view/unity-fundamentals

 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfYhN-kdbe_WXmBAFoDOA9Q

 

They're usually outdated. You can't update a book once it hit the shelves.

 

Because making text tutorial is so much harder than video one. </sarcasm>

To make video tutorial, you need to have:
- Good voice or know willing person with a good voice
- Screen-recording software
- A script - making tutorial without one will bring only pain and suffering both for you and your viewers
- If you mess up during recording, you have to re-record whole thing

To make text-based tutorial you need to have:
- Any word processor
- A keyboard with a Print Screen key

 

No, we shouldn't. Docs can, at best, tell you what feature X and Y are doing, even if they are pretty similar. They however won't show you sample usages or "corner cases" where it's better to use feature X over feature Y (or vice versa). Tutorials take care of that.

 

How many tutorials have you made? A good video is marginally easier to make than a good text tutorial. Especially at the beginner level. And beginner level is where most of the tutorial demand is.

Video is also easier to distribute, discover and monetise.

At the advanced levels text becomes easier and more in demand. But content consumers become much thinner.

 

Not if your voice sounds like 12 year old despite being in your mid-twenties. Good voice, possibly even trailer-worthy is a must in case of video tutorials. Or you end up having to use filters like Extra Credits guy has to.

//edit: Also it's "than" in this case, not "then".

 

Darn it. Serves me right for coming down hard on capital letters on UA this morning.

There are a few voices I can't stand to listen to in video tutorials, but most of the time I don't have any real issues listening to most youtubers.

That said I have had a couple of viewers comment that they struggle to follow the Australian accent. That really, really gets on my nerves when people complain that I have an Aussie accent. Unfortunately I don't have any reliable stats that say anything about the connection between my voice/accent and my viewership.

 

I wish the wiki was still active here, that had some nice gems in it.

Anyway, yeah I got to say I find 99% of youtube stuff UNBEARABLE.

They never edit the thing, it's usually 5 minutes before the tutorial even starts, they usually sigh and mutter through the whole thing, once they get to the meat of it it's usually blasted through, the videos NEVER start by showing the end result, the text is NEVER formated to be visable on anything less that full screen on a large monitor, all videos are just clones of clones, and (yes) a lot of them are impossible to understand the person talking.

That said, Lynda.com has got lots of great tutorials and they're $25 a month with some awesome sample videos.
http://www.lynda.com/Unity-training-tutorials/1242-0.html

Oh, and books suck because they know they already got your sale if you bought it and don't care if it's jammed packed full of errors and broken code.

 

You mean this one? I don't know how active it is, but it does have some nice scripts on it.

http://wiki.unity3d.com

 

That's exactly how I evolved to do it as well. Our videos are "good" based on the criteria voiced in this thread as well. Short, focused, good voice (so I've been told) etc.

 

Yup!