One Year of Learning Unity, C# and YouTube from Scratch
Hello everyone and welcome to my channel. A few weeks ago I passed the one year anniversary of me starting to learn Unity and C# in my spare time, and I’m still enjoying it immensely.
Part0 (Introduction): • [Unity3D Hex Map Game Dev] 0: Introduction...
Part1 (Hexes to Water): • [Unity3D Hex Map Game Dev] 1: Hexes to Water
Part2 (Features and Textures): • [Unity3D Hex Map Game Dev] 2: Features, Te...
Part3 (Units, Visibility): • [Unity3D Hex Map Game Dev] 3: Units, Pathf...
Part4 (Random Maps): • [Unity3D Hex Map Game Dev] 4: Creating Ran...
Part5 (Post Processing): • [Unity3D Hex Map Game Dev] 5: Post Process...
Part6 (Resource Gathering): • [Unity3D Hex Map Game Dev] 6: Automated Re...
Part7 (Spinning Selector): • [Unity3D Hex Map Game Dev] 7: Spinning Obj...
Part8 (Preparing for Resources): • [Unity3D Hex Map Game Dev] 8: Preparing fo...
Part9(How Much Wood?): • [Unity3D Hex Map Game Dev] 9: How Much Woo...
Part10(Dynamic Trees): • [Unity3D Hex Map Game Dev] 10: Dynamic Trees
Part11(Meet The Meeples): • [Unity3D Hex Map Game Dev] 11: Meet The Me...
Part12(Harvesting Wood): • [Unity3D Hex Map Game Dev] 12: Harvesting ...
Part13(Harvesting Stone): • [Unity3D Hex Map Game Dev] 13: Harvesting ...
Part14(Walking Around Wallls): • [Unity3D Hex Map Game Dev] 14: Stop Walkin...
Part15(Multiple Unit Types): • [Unity3D Hex Map Game Dev] 15: Preparing f...
Part16(Manipulate Terrain): • [Unity3D Hex Map Game Dev] 16: Manipulate ...
Part17(ResourceBuilding Upgrades): • [Unity3D Hex Map Game Dev] 17: Resource Bu...
Part18(Camera Fly-through): • [Unity3D Hex Map Game Dev] 18: Camera Fly ...
Part19(Animated UI): • [Unity3D Hex Map Game Dev] 19: Animated Us...
Part20(Automated Farming): • [Unity3D Hex Map Game Dev] 20: Automated R...
Part21(UI Anchors, Buttons, ToolTip): • [Unity3D Hex Map Game Dev] 21: UI Anchors,...
I still remember how utterly impressed I’d been after seeing a YouTube video about Unity, probably about a year earlier. A short time later, I purchased a 95% discount Udemy Unity course, which was just lying dormant. Then, one day, I saw another Unity video, and I decided to install Unity and start working through the course. I completed about three of the small starter projects and felt I wanted to get going on something of my own.
By this time I was following various YouTube tutorials, with Code Monkey and Brackeys being especially helpful. While I eventually mastered the tutorials I spent enough time with to some degree, I still remember how enormous the Unity environment seemed, and rightly so. There were so many different windows and panels, a myriad of components, sub-components and sub-sub-components to learn about, and they were so intertwined that trying to learn about the one invariably sent you down a different path trying to learn about another. It was during this phase that I gave animation a stab.
I think it was then that I knew that, if I was going to put in the effort to learn these systems, I wanted to do it in 3D. It bothered me that the views I worked on would always be only the one side, and wanting to see the object from a different viewpoint would basically mean a totally new model and animation. And so I plunged into 3D.
I set out to build a little woodcutter’s cabin scene with some moving elements incorporated. I started working on various weather and other effects – clouds, lightning, rain, stars and a fire-and-light combination. I learned a lot about particle systems and started identifying opportunities to improve on the implementations I found in YouTube tutorials.
One of the first decent contributions I’ve made completely by myself was a milky-way like night sky of stars, where the stars twinkled, rotated around the terrain and faded out properly, firstly when it got cloudy and secondly as they neared the horizon. Another contribution was an automated flying script, which allowed animated birds to follow random paths through the sky while adhering to constraints. I put all of this together in a cabin scene, with the elements reacting to one another, and then had the urge to share it.
Now I also had to learn video and sound editing, get some decent channel art and do everything a YouTube channel required from you. By the time my channel went live, I’d also been working on a solar system – well, the sun, earth and moon only, and again I felt the need to share that, especially as educational content in my mother tongue, Afrikaans. So, I made three English and Afrikaans videos on that.
Then I started visualizing mathematical concepts as a way to further learn Unity, and kept making these videos. My command of Unity kept improving. While graphics was always going to be my weak point, I started feeling that I could decrease the cringe factor more and more, especially if I could seek out the correct visual assets for the situation to help me out.
And then one day in November 2019 I came across Jasper Flick, or Catlike Coding’s hex map tutorials, and I was hooked. I now knew that, with the correct visual asset assistance, I could one day make a decent game. It’s still a long way off, but I’m still enjoying it.
My thanks go out to everyone watching, and interacting on, the videos. And if you can think of someone who may enjoy the channel, please spread the word. Let’s see what the next year brings …