Unity - the beginnings

I started an online course in Unity a while back, but as most of the first 10 lectures were about opening the program and saving folders into the right place I got a bit bored and didn't really make much progress.

This is exactly what my students would be like when we would have to start any lessons learning to video edit by painfully explaining what format and resolution the project would need to be, plus where exactly to save footage and where to save the project. Now I realise how dull it was, but to an editing geek it was the the foundations of a zen-like pathway to editing enlightenment and DEATHLY VITAL!!! There is nothing worse than a student losing their work, except for the constipated face of their teacher who had told them EXACTLY what to do at the very start of the project, was inevitably ignored and is currently holding in Vesuvius behind fake 'it's OK we can TRY to fix it' eyes.

But that is all behind me now and those memories only wake me maybe once a week.

Anyway this constant cycle of vital instruction, failure to follow said instruction, and scramble to pick up the pieces has probably left me in good stead for meticulously following the course instructions and actually remembering to do everything right by myself in the future.

So I have learnt that you mustn't move files/folders around unless you have exited Unity (and it's IDE, Monodevelop) first. Good. I won't.

Once all that was out of the way I actually began to use Unity, and on looks alone, it looks a lot like Premiere or Final Cut (the good ones, before X) which I am happily familiar with. So maybe I CAN make a game.

My first game is...

In which the computer guesses the number you are thinking of through mystical means!!!! Ooooohhhh!

Well no, mystical means would be pretty hard to code, so actually it will choose half of the range and ask you if your number lies there. Then continue in the same fashion until you finally say 'yes! that is my bleeping number, how did you guess that...?'.

So far I have learned the print function and how to write a string (or technically revisited these concepts as I have learned a little coding before through Codecademy and Khan Academy - maybe I can tell you a little about this another time). I am just starting to learn how to get a key press as an input and the difference between start and update commands so currently my code looks like this:

33 lines of joy

I hope you find that lovely too.

The course teaches you how to look up things that you don't know, rather than just telling you exactly what you have to write, so I already know how to google the exact term for something (which I know is something that some professional developers will approve of!)

And it works...so far.