Tools: GitHub & Cloud9

GitHub, the world's largest code host.  Generally terminal command line, the instantly confusing black box with white Courier font, can be intimidating.  It feels if you type one wrong command, or miss a single letter, you could destroy your entire project!  Let's face it, with all these fears you could end up avoiding the tool rather than embracing it.

Familiarity.

I find I am most scared of the unknown or unfamiliar.  Get comfortable with GitHub.  CodeSchool has an awesome course entitled "Try Git" for free.  It teaches you the basics in a very practical and immediately applicable manner.  The "Advice" box to the right of the tutorial explains the vocabulary used within GitHub.

As you progress through the tutorial, you recognize you are starting to understand what "version control" means and most importantly, how to use it.

Freedom.

While Git is social (sharable), for an independent developer it is often just you, or just me.  I don't want to be stuck in my house at a desk all day long.  What if its nice outside?  What if an awesome coffee shop/cafe just opened down the road?  What if I'm feeling lazy and want to work from the couch?  GitHub makes that super easy!  I can download my entire project in a .zip and work away.

Flexibility.

Downloading and setting up an IDE can be a bit cumbersome and working from Notepad might not offer me all the flexibility I want.  Enter new tool Cloud9 IDE.  This online platform connects with your GitHub repository (tutorial).  You can customize the development environment to suit your needs, then use the console to commit just like you would otherwise.  You cannot debug in Cloud9 as C# and JavaScript are not supported languages to Run/Debug (but the awesome-est language Ruby is!!!).  Just test back at your computer with Unity installed.

Your new ease of mobility can take you anywhere!  The "home office" isn't so limited anymore.  So, what do you think?  Where would you find yourself with this new freedom and flexibility??

30 Days of C# Unity and the Lifetime Love

Hey everyone!!

The Hiatus.
Its been a while.  Let's rewind a little bit.  I started 30 Days of C# Unity in April and have since then used Unity on a daily basis.  The reason for my absence?  We needed me to learn faster.

Imagine Me.
I worked on Imagine Me, a 2D-platformer, in various roles up to this point.  On May 16, Chris and I decided to pull the plug on our current random generation system in the game.  We were not happy with it (understatement) and neither was the community.  Chris was (and is) working a full time job.  The indie dev thing is something we have done in our home life because we love it.  He didn't have the resources (time and energy) needed to rewrite the random generation AND continue development on the rest of the game.  We desperately needed a second developer.

Refined by Fire.
The job fell to me - the novice, C#-hating, Unity hesitant, just-getting-her-feet-wet girl.  I was thrown into the fire with a community full of expectations waiting on the other side.  It couldn't have worked out better.  I used the tools already enlisted from my "30 Days of C# Unity" They were a huge help and I stand behind each one listed in this blog.

Today.
Today, work is almost done with Imagine Me's new random generation.  I am tweaking a final few things to give it an appropriate feel, and prepping for adding it into the current game.  Later, I will create a "Projects" tutorial of my own to share with you, but for now my 30 Days of  C# Unity has turned into a Lifetime Love for three words: "Made in Unity".

Day 4 of C# Unity

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.

30 Days of C# Unity

Today starts a new chapter.  As you can surmise from the title, I will begin learning a bit of C# and the Unity game engine.  I will be using a variety of learning tools, tutorials, and as always, writing a response to the day's exercises here :)  I would absolutely love it if you followed along on my 30 day journey and always welcome comments, questions, and tips.  Are you ready?  30 Days of C# Unity begins... now!