It's Day 4 and I'm back to the
Space Shooter! The hands on experience with these projects has become a wonderful compliment to the Beginner Scripting lessons, but more on that later...
Project: Space Shooter
I began today's session by covering a quick review of the last video I had watched in the project. This was very useful to 1. put my brain in "Unity" mode and 2. refresh where I had left off. The
Camera and Lighting video was an awesome refresher on Unity's orientation. Remember: Left Handed. I practiced orientation by putting my left hand in weird positions, then guessing what the camera would show. It helped a lot!
The next lesson
Adding a Background was pretty straight forward. Create a quad, add texture/material, adjust shader, scale, and transform. One cool trick I didn't know before involved dragging a texture directly onto the mesh in the scene. Unity creates a material for you! While creating a material yourself is not difficult, eliminating a couple steps eliminates possible errors and mishaps - always a good thing.
One thing to note, the shader step was very shallow. The reference material, provided in the links to documentation, was either too vague or too advanced. I really hope to find more on shaders and materials later.
Moving the Player provided an awesome opportunity for me to practice the Beginner Scripting lessons from
Day 3. The lesson reviewed public variables,
FixedUpdate,
Vector3, and
rigidbody. It also provided an introduction for the next lessons in the Topics tutorials including an introduction to data types,
GetAxis, and using classes.
I most enjoyed the segment on
Mathf.Clamp. This is probably the first time I've thought C# had a useful function.
Clamp is awesome. It allows you to constrain a game object to whatever space you define, and all in just a few lines of code!
I followed along quite easily until the last segment using
Quaternion.Euler. Yikes. When I clicked on the reference material it brought me to
Intermediate Scripting. I knew I wasn't ready for this level of scripting, but felt unsatisfied blindly typing away.
Overall the lesson was perfectly paired with Beginner Scripting. I highly recommend using the Beginner Tutorial Scripting and Space Shooter project
together. Tomorrow is back to scripting lessons!
Have you found any useful beginner tutorials on shaders?? Please link them in the comments. I would love to understand them better.
