All words presented in this blog are purely opinion, not fact - unless specifically stated otherwise in the post.

Tuesday 27 March 2018

Learning things

So over the past 6 months, among other things I’ve been learning to code. I chose to learn C# as it’s what my company uses to work in Unity 3D. This meant that I could get straight into it but also that I would have plenty of help and resources as I continued. At present I don’t think I’m as yet at a level where I can do much but I am getting better and thought I’d offer you a few resources that have helped me.

Currently I'm working through a series of tutorials on Udemy. It's the series you'll have seen on the side bar of your screen on facebook or any other similar site if you've expressed even a remote interest in games development:
https://www.udemy.com/unitycourse/
It's a full course taking you through understanding how to create almost the whole of Unity with a view to understand C#. It's a great course but it isn't without it's faults.
It's been built for a person using Unity 4.0, not 5.0 or later which is significantly more common these days. So far it hasn't been too difficult to translate btu I believe there are some areas later that get a little confusing.
Personally this hasn't been an issue as I am well versed in Unity and find it easy to navigate already, however I could understand a person who has no experience getting lost.
That said one of my other problems is that as a person with Unity experience there are some times that I find myself dozing off because they are explaining certain things with a level of detail that seems pointless. Perhaps this is necessary for complete beginners, but for me it's tedius. However I can skip forward so  Ican't complain too much.
My biggest complaint lies in the quizzes. throughout the course there are a bunch of quizzes ostensibly to make sure you're keeping up, however some of the questions (a lot of them in fact) make it seem more like there are questions for questions sake. I would like proper quizzes which I could fail to make sure for myself that I am understanding and taking everything in. Perhaps a section where it has a piece of code that is broken and I can figure out how to fix it. Alas I find questions such as 'which version of unity are we using' or 'why to we refactor code to be smaller if possible' the answers being '4.0' even though I'm actually using Unity 2017.2.1p2 and 'because it's cleaner.' no technical stuff, nothing useful, just opinion really.
Regardless, it's a really useful course and its fairly cheap. Never pay more than £15 for it. if its higher than that wait and it'll go down in a week, or check on the mobile app and it might be cheaper.

As a foundation I went through these two coding tutorials on linkedin's 'In-Learning'
Both of which were very good but very basic. I would recommend using the Udemy course unless you have access to linkedin learning through your company, like I did at the time.

While the above are all paid for tutorials they are worth the money, especially the udemy course, which has 55 hours of videos, 45 hours of which are actually worth it.
That said you can also get some amazing free tutorials, both for general understanding and for more specific things on Youtube.

I love being a games designer, but it becomes clearer and clearer that even as a games designer you would do very well to learn how to code.

So excited
- James

Saturday 17 March 2018

Round and around

It's been a while since I wrote on here, almost 3 years in fact, but I never stopped thinking about it. I dont think anyone follows this site, at least not religiously, so I don't think anyone has been too put out by this but still, it sucks.
I originally started this blog so I had something to do in the morning at work when I had nothing to do, so it's a little ironic that I feel that it is work itself that makes me not have the energy to post here at all.
I'm not very good at the social media thing, i rarely post on twitter and i think my instagram has a grand total of 4 posts, but it feels like social media is the future, so I'm trying to get out there a little more.

Anyway, My new portfolio website is up please feel free to take a look at it:
http://www.jvarma.co.uk/

I'm currently playing Stardew valley and developing a big D&D campaign world. more info on the latter to come.