Unity Learning Journey #3 - Video Games!

  • Article

The exciting life of a Technical Evangelist requires you to be willing and able to jump on an airplane at a moment's notice! Before I'd even unpacked from the week-long offsite training event in September in Denver, Colorado, I was asked if I wanted to fly to Dallas, Texas for a "Day of Unity" training event in two days' time. Never one to turn down a challenge or a learning opportunity, I tossed my clothes back in the suitcase and hit the tarmac again.

Day of Unity - September 26, 2014

Developing the Game: "Nightmares"

Participants constructed an all-open-source sample game project codenamed “Nightmares” - an isometric 3D cartoon shooter. Learning Unity skills from a beginner to intermediate perspective, we learned how to make this sample game in this intensive one day course.

Learning Outcomes:

The specific topics covered included:

  • General Unity operation, tips and tricks
  • Communicating between scripts.
  • Public vs. private references in programming.
  • Static variables.
  • Vector Mathematics for 3D gameplay mechanics.
  • Using timers.
  • Using different camera settings.
  • Creating Game Objects at runtime.
  • Using the Animator for Generic characters.
  • Animation Events.
  • Simple use of Audio.
  • Using the New UI system.
  • The use of Prefabs.
  • Use of effects such as Line Renderers and Particle Systems
  • Using the Nav Mesh for enemy characters.

Press

 

Jason Fox giving a great presentation before we kicked things off!

 

Enjoying the company of my fellow Tech Evangelist Nathalie Goh-Livorness! Dallas knows how to put on a great event!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 30, 2014
    Are you also the MonoGame/XNA Evangelist? Will the next version of XNA be 6 - following the naming pattern that Windows 10 has established? PS: XNA xNext is a top request by the community with over 18'000 votes visualstudio.uservoice.com/.../3725445-xna-5

  • Anonymous
    October 01, 2014
    Right now the focus is on Unity, due to ease of use, and it's ability to work cross platform. Even better, the IL2CPP workflow will make it even better for us, considering that the code no longer needs to be running Mono or .NET on each platform -- it will simply compile to C++ on every device. Unity gave several excellent talks on it during UNITE this year. I'm a former XNA developer myself, so I feel your pain :). With that said, I love MonoGame, and I'd love to see it on Windows 10 and Xbox One as well. As was tweeted by @joebelfiore during BUILD 2014, support for C# development will be coming to Xbox. Please stay tuned for more information. The .NET Blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/dotnet) is the best way to stay up to date with the latest in .NET. Feel free to ping me with any questions: Dvoyles at Microsoft dot com

  • Anonymous
    October 13, 2014
    The comment has been removed