Went through the back half of the 2D Game Kit (teleporting to another scene, and the video walkthrough). The video walkthrough was interesting — about half of it was information that had been covered partially or completely in the written tutorial, another 25% was inferrable, and the rest was basically new. For example respectively: monsters and how to fight/mod them; the fact that you can set up damageable obstacles and break down objects in your path (the written tutorial only covered damaging monsters, but it works the same way); and how to add items to your inventory and trigger dialogue popups. Still, I don’t think the redundancies were a bad thing, since working through a tutorial by yourself and having a game designer talk through her thought process both lay out two different and useful perspectives. Also, one noted difference between the 2D Game Kit and the Kart modding tutorial – the 2D Game Kit came with a lot of art assets, which I couldn’t change the color or look of easily. In the Kart mods, it was pretty simple to adjust the albedo on any given asset, which weren’t usually art/images.
Other plans today: get a jump on “Getting Started with Unity”, and maybe look into some project management frameworks I’m not familiar with (specifically, Agile). The Getting Started tutorial looks like it’ll have some redundancies for me — I already worked through go-kart modding, I’ve tooled around a bit with the FPS intro project, and I have at least passing familiarity with the Unity editor by now — but there may be some new tidbits.
Re: Agile, I’m passing familiar with the concept, but I don’t have a lot of experience with how to apply it properly. What I’m hoping is for better information on how to set up those sorts of recurring, multi-step processes (or whether Gantt charts can be extended easily and intuitively into an Agile framework, because I like Gantt charts a lot).
This’ll teach me to look ahead — I started poking through “Getting Started with Unity” and it turned out that a lot of it was geared specifically towards the sorts of streams I already worked through with ‘Your First Game Jam’! I’m now wondering whether to work through the FPS and platformer exercises, though I’m planning to skip the kart modding section… but maybe it would be more worth it to move on to a different tutorial?
As for Agile, I ended up going through a LinkedIn Learning tutorial on “Agile Foundations” that has been pretty disappointing so far. There’s some good information about Agile’s values and mindset, but most of it is evangelizing. I’m hoping there will be more actionable information later on, in the section devoted to Scrum, Kanban, and something called Extreme Programming (!).
Overall, a pretty scattered day, but I feel like I at least got information I can use in a couple different areas.
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