As some of you may know I teach Unity as part of my job and part of my recent research has been focused on developing a new method of teaching Unity to beginners. Having collaborated with a number of other Unity tutors worldwide in critiquing my previous approach to teaching, I have developed a new modular approach which combines small modules of information, and challenges that bring what you have learned together.
I am currently appealing to the Unity community to take a look at the early beta version of the site and give me feedback via the comments and suggestions parts of the site. Anything you’d like to see added – or you think works or doesn’t work in an educational sense – feel free to let me know!
Found some fantastic looking tutorials on painting textures for games by the very talented Sky at http://www.smileybones.com/, go take a look and enjoy the gorgeous artwork, and handy tutorials, cheers!
A slight digression from the usual Unity related stuff on the site, so apologies!
As part of a set of ongoing research into the best way to teach Unity, I’d like to hear from you.
If you use Unity in any way, please take part in this short survey, it shouldn’t take any more than 3 minutes of your time and comes with a tiny treat at the end!
If you are a tutor who works with Unity in a high school, college or university, i’d love to discuss my research with you and maybe help you out too! please email at willgoldstone at gmail with the subject line ‘Unity Teaching‘, thanks!
The good folks over at Unify community are holding another Uni Knowledge this year. If you missed the last one the concept is simple, make a sample game project, and document it for others to learn from.. if you do a great job, you could win a prize!
This might mean blogging about what you’re making, writing up scripts with comments, providing editor scripts to help users tweak the final game and generally tailor your project to be informative and educational – let your audience know WHY you’re making things work the way they do.
Plus! this isn’t just a thankless task, oh no my friend there are PRIZES! to be won, the list so far is as follows -
I stumbled accross this amazing video / instructables tutorial set a few weeks back but only just had time to sit down and write about it. If you’re not a ludicrous NES fan like myself then perhaps this won’t be AS exciting as it was when I found it, but hey here goes anyway!
Many people have enjoyed experimenting with external devices to control Unity, the most prominent in this context being Darwiin remote (or PC equivalent) which has been used alongside the plugin on the wiki in order to use the Wiimote in conjunction with Unity.
So imagine my amazement when I came across someone who had managed to get a Nintendo Power Glove to do the same thing. Oh wait, you don’t recall the PowerGlove? oh dear, well lets get you up to speed as frankly it wasn’t the most succesful peripheral at the time..
The Power Glove was developed by Abrams Gentile Entertainment and Mattel and licensed by Nintendo in 1989 for the NES – a good four years into its tenure in our living rooms. It didn’t really do a whole lot but ostensibly was an early wii-like sign from Ninty that said they were willing to experiment with their products, and take the controller away from simply button bashing.
Placing buttons in the fingertips, and mimicking human movements inside the back of hand unit, the glove controlled games using gestures, but ultimately was highly innacurate, and was mostly ignored and mocked for its poor quality responses.
Fastforward to the glove’s 20th Anniversary, and a ludicrously intelligent chap called Matt Mechtley (who also develops those awesome games at Blurst.com over at Flashbang studios) has decided to take the power glove apart and combine it with arduino – a small interface technology you can look up here – in order to control games in software such as Unity. In his demo he finishes by controlling a simple primitive in Unity, and frankly it is astonishing what he has achieved with a few modifications via Arduino.
Here is Matt’s video ‘tutorial’ (in quotations there not negatively but simply as he doesn’t have time to explain each step) -
and here is a link to the Instructables.com page with more detail, epic props to you Matt!
Hi all, so this is some shameless self promotion on my part but hey, its been 10 months of work so I feel justified! I’ve finally finished my book on Unity, called “Unity Game Development Essentials” which is going to press with Packt Publishing this week.
It has been available through the publisher’s RAW program in early draft form for a couple of months and this week the finished version will be available to buy as PDF and Paperback via Amazon, Safari, Netlibrary, barnes and nobles and borders.
Hope it helps out beginners starting out in the wonderful world of Unity development!
Will
UPDATE:
The book is now available via the aforementioned outlets, and here they are -
Andrew Gotow, Unity & Maya developer has provided this excellent tutorial to setting up a car in Unity. Whilst there have been tutorials on this in the past, currently the Unity site lacks its former ‘Race Demo’ example project – this more than fills that void, a big thanks to Andrew for providing this to the community, Cheers!
Thanks to Gregory Pierce for authoring and making me aware of his Learn Unity iPhone series, available on Scribd.com. He has provided, complete with screenshots, a step by step overview of getting started, customizing builds, creating scenes and scripting basic motion with the iPhone, a fantastic set of tutorials with more to come soon! Here are the links to each individual tutorial -
Emil Johansen, aka AngryAnt, has been working for some time on his ‘Path’ pathfinding AI system for Unity. A remarkable piece of work, Emil has even gone so far as to make a complete video tutorial on the system, explaining its usage and how it works. A big thanks goes out to him for this amazing contribution to the Unity community, as this system is provided free – see the license on his site for more information.
For those of you new to Unity, and especially from a Flash development background, Richard Hart from EthicalGames.Wordpress.com has some great starter video tutorials for you. Covering some basic elements step by step, at the time of writing Richard has done 7 short tutorials to get you started.
Here are some direct links to the blog posts that feature his videos -
As some of you may know I teach Unity as part of my job and part of my recent research has been focused on developing a new method of teaching Unity to beginners. Having collaborated with a number of other Unity tutors worldwide in critiquing my previous approach to teaching, I have developed a new modular approach which combines small modules of information, and challenges that bring what you have learned together.
Andrew Gotow, Unity & Maya developer has provided this excellent tutorial to setting up a car in Unity. Whilst there have been tutorials on this in the past, currently the Unity site lacks its former ‘Race Demo’ example project – this more than fills that void, a big thanks to Andrew for providing this to the community, Cheers!
Thanks to Gregory Pierce for authoring and making me aware of his Learn Unity iPhone series, available on Scribd.com. He has provided, complete with screenshots, a step by step overview of getting started, customizing builds, creating scenes and scripting basic motion with the iPhone, a fantastic set of tutorials with more to come soon! Here are the links to each individual tutorial -
For those of you new to Unity, and especially from a Flash development background, Richard Hart from 