Ongoing Investigations

Tag: refactoring projects

  • Thinking Through Progress

    This’ll just be a bit of a ramble to sort of work through my plans. Topics: the Creator Kit: Beginner Code Kit, the VR Beginner kit, designing & planning my own Unity projects.

    Beginner Code Kit

    I’ve left the Beginner Code kit so long that I can’t really remember what I was in the middle of (or where I left my files) when I was last working on them. Teach me to write up my escapades better.

    My last Beginner Code post was about finishing up the core units, not about the day I spent wrestling with writing original code from scratch. The primary reason is because I spent that day reading documentation trying to figure out what I needed to access, so I didn’t feel that I had anything to write up, but I was wrong. Oh, I was wrong.

    Probably the next step would be to go back and restart the write-from-scratch unit, working through the documentation again. It’ll be a pain to start over, but it’s the cleanest way I have of making sure it happens.

    The goal of this write-from-scratch in Beginner Code is not necessarily to mod the game, by the way. It’s to just… have something I came up with and wrote myself work. That’ll be a big win for me.

    VR Beginner Kit

    After the Beginner Code kit I have two VR tutorials on deck: one about an escape room and one that’s just a beginner’s guide. They look about comparable, which means I think I’ll go with the escape room, since it involves puzzles (hopefully).

    It’s not supposed to involve much programming, if any, which means that I’ll mostly be getting oriented in VR and thinking about how to design for it instead of doing the coding principles. Maybe I should look up a more advanced coding tutorial as well…

    Planning Projects

    The line to thread on projects is something that’s a) interesting, b) achievable, and c) relevant. A project I don’t care about is a project that will suffer; a project that I can’t accomplish (even if I have to stretch and grow to do it) is pointless; a project that isn’t useful is doomed.

    As far as Unity goes, we don’t have a lot of call right now that I can see for a project, though thinking about potential AR applications around campus might have legs. In the meantime, it’s possible I’ll try and keep my hand in by programming smaller projects outside of Unity, to keep in the mindset and the habit.

    I do have potential game ideas that would be a good way to practice full-scale development in Unity… hm.

  • Code, Cactuses, and Kanban

    Not a whole lot to report today, just some floundering as I try and figure out my next steps. There’s two fronts I’ve been talking about, Agile and Unity, so I’ll cover them both.

    Agile

    Simply put: I don’t have a whole lot I can adapt for Agile in my current work. The projects I’m working on sort of suit it — Agile is about incremental deliverables which add functionality, which is a lot of what I’m currently doing in my documentation and policy work.

    But most of Agile’s (well, Scrum’s) tactics really boil down to ways to keep a team motivated, focused and cross-functional. Daily stand-ups? Planning poker games? Those are ways not just of managing information, but engagement.

    I did pick up the Kanban swim lane diagram practice, though. I have a Trello board. It’s very pretty (and it’s easy to keep notes on each card).

    Unity

    Unity today has been a lot about figuring out where I am. The most recent thing on my project chart has been working through a lot of the beginner projects — except I’ve already done most of the Kart build, and I’ve at least touched on the platformer and FPS microgames (this was back in August or early September, before I started writing things down). I didn’t want to work through a list of things I’d already done, or things which were almost the same as what I’d already done (modding out the platformer was mostly just about aesthetics, which we did a bit in the Kart game; modding the FPS game looks almost exactly the same, except that you have to purchase all the modding resources). 0/10, highly demotivating.

    After I’d finished the beginner projects (you know, the thing I didn’t do because I’d already done it), the plan was to plan an original project of my own, then create it. I… don’t think I’m ready for that yet, in part because I don’t know where I’d get assets that have behaviors and functions attached. Maybe I’d have to write my own.

    So instead, I started poking through the other tutorials Unity offers in the ‘Learn’ tab of Unity Hub. I came across one that looked particularly interesting, called “Creator Kit: Beginner Code“. It said it recommended working through one of the other Creator Kits first, so I noodled around with one called “Creator Kit: Puzzle” (I love puzzle games). But in the end, it looked pretty similar to the microgames, so I let that one go.

    This means it’s (sort of) settled: Beginner Code will be my next project. I’ll start working on learning C#, and hey, maybe I’ll even manage to go back to Codecademy for a little extra practice. I haven’t had the chance to dig into the actual tutorial yet beyond getting it just set up and imported, so there’s nothing to report on that front, but from what I’ve seen so far, it has cactuses in it. So, a win on all fronts.

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