Game Dev in Progress… Day 18

Hello there. Happy Aloha Friday and today I have some very good news, I was able to finish the 2D Course!!! With this, I am getting closer to becoming a fully fledged game developer and software engineer! Before I dive into the next course, I would like to showcase some of the things I learned from the 2D course and give a brief overview of what I accomplished today.

There were a lot of things that I learned about being a general software engineer as a whole going through this course. One of the earlier things that I figured out is that generally speaking, I you don’t know how to solve a problem off the top of your head, find somebody else who does. A lot of my time was reading documentation and looking up solutions online. Some of the times if I am lucky, I get the exact solution I wanted but most of the time this is not the case. I had to rely heavily on modifying code I found online to work for the problem that I had. Another thing that I learned is to be not afraid in asking questions. If I get stuck on a particular problem for 30 minutes, it was okay to ask for help. The last thing I learned is to make sure to debug as often as you can. I found out some bugs that could have been avoided early on but had to deal with them later, which was a pain to do as there was already so much other code added that it was hard to identify where the bug was. Overall I learned a lot doing the 2D course even though I’m a graduate in Computer Science.

A quick overview of what I accomplished today before signing off and enjoying the weekend. The first part of the morning was spent on finishing up the 2D course, fixing minor bugs and finalizing the attack pattern of the boss. In the afternoon, I was able to setup and start on the second section of the Cinematography course. Here is a screen shot of what I having going on right now:

For this course, I was given all the assets I needed for free (Thank you GameDevHQ!), and for this particular part I was given a tour on how apply and modify materials on game objects in the scenes. The windows in particular was pretty cool as it was transparent. An easy way to do that is create a material > change the rendering mode to transparent on the inspector > and then changing the alpha value, the lower the alpha the more transparent it was. This showed me how versatile Unity is, even a person who has little to no graphic design/art background can make some pretty cool looking stuff.

All in all, today was a pretty huge milestone in my quest to become a fully fledged software engineer. I hope to learn more about Unity and hone my problem solving skills. Thank you for reading and have a great weekend!

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Cristian Aspacio