NuTrynity's Perspective

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Abstract

Introduction

Hello! I am NuTrynity, I am a beginner in Game Development in General, I had made games before like "Remember It!" for my school's Software Festival, I have mostly made games from the Godot game Engine, but I wanted to learn Unity since I've heard it to be the Engine used in my local College's Game Development course, and finding out about this Jam was an opportunity for me to get into Game Jamming and Learning at the same time!

Personal Goals

I wanted to learn Unity so that I can create games, because it is my passion to play video games, and computer programming as well, when I found this Jam it was the Golden Opportunity for me to start learning Unity and experience how working in a Game Jam feels like.

Figure 1: Unused level design during early stages of development

What I've Learned

What I learned from Unity and C#

From the start I had a good time learning the Unity Editor since I have the familiarity of what Game Engines have coming out from Godot, but I can't seem to still wrap my head around C# and its Structures and Object Oriented Programming, but I do learned how to connect Scripts to buttons now at least haha.

But seriously I have learned a lot in Unity, I have learn that Unity is leaned on interacting with GameObjects, and how Tilemaps work and how to make an auto tilemap based on rules, how C# can call other variables with GetComponent<>; Still don't know whats the difference with normally calling the class and stating the variable, and learned on how much you will see NullReferenceException all the time! But I still have a lot to learn, since Game Dev is a Journey and learning Code takes a lot of time, the main Gripe I had in this Game Jam is the C# experience and I still have to grasp the language more.

Also, Damn What is this File Size!?

Figure 2: Empty Project File in Unity

Working as a Team

I am the least experienced member of the team though, so I had to learn fast to keep up with them and learn at the same time, at most times I feel like I was more of a burden, but I learned that as a team, I should be more outward towards my teammates about the problems I faced, so that to prevent the problem to become bigger than what I can handle, I am grateful for the help that I received and the fun moments I shared with them.

Figure 3: VortexB teaching me about how C# works

Troubles

Of course I had some troubles when I started out on this Journey, one thing to point out is that I am using Linux, so sometimes errors just pop up that are uniquely on Linux Distros only, and sometimes Git also gives me problems, like that one time I pushed my project and broke everything, to this day I still don't know how that happened

Figure 4: I do not know how what specific problem this is...

Recommendations

Tips and Trivia

Here are some unordered lists of what I have learned so far, though this is not a definitive list of real tips, just some things I have experienced while working in Unity.

Always remember to check your layers, I always forgot Unity 2D is secretly still 3D
Use FixedUpdate() on Movement..
Do not trust Unity IntelliSense Autocomplete -linglings
Please use Anchors... Or else your UI will break when they change the resolution
Use Awake() method whenever subscribing to ~~my youtube channel~~ OnSignalEvents
Install GCM before you push on Git