Got a tutorial request?

Hey guys, I've been meaning to write up some tutorials for a while now and I'd like to get a sense of what folks would like to see/if anyone is interested at all.

I'd like to do written tutorials because I find that often with videos you're only looking for a certain thing and don't want to waste time watching an hour long video to find it.

Most of my knowledge revolves around Unity and Unreal, but I'm open to doing tutorials outside of this (SDL in c++, phaser in javascript or haxeflixel in haxe).

Some topics floating around in my head:
* Unreal for Unity devs (or: where did my magic functions go??)
* Let's optimize this badly performing game and learn about optimization in the process.
* Writing tools for the Unity editor, and when not to.
* A gentle introduction to Unity/Unreal for non programmers
* Math. For games. For people who don't like math very much.

Comments

  • Yesssss another famous @Stray_Train tutorial would be great.

    In order of preference for me:

    1. Tools
    2. Maths
    3. Optimization
  • I've personally been interested in programming topics, because of how all of what I know about programming has been learnt on the job, having never gone through an actual computer science degree. I've been able to brute force everything I've needed (and often find it to be sufficient), but I'm regularly interested in having more tools in my scripting toolkit.

    In particular, I found your delegates talk really interesting (I've personally always used bools/flags that get checked every frame...), and it's the kind of thing I wouldn't think to Google because I don't even know it's there. (Technically I did know it was there, but never felt I needed it, so I didn't bother. But I imagine there are plenty of potentially useful things that can help me write code faster that could come in handy!)

    Something else I think I could learn from you/programmers is what sorts of things that are just plain slow. Some things I think are obvious (like doing superfluous things in an update/tick), but some things were not at all obvious to me (like setting a length to a list before adding things to it being faster than just adding things to it). I had a programmer explain some things to me while I was trying to work out why a tool of mine took some 15 min to execute over million+ vert meshes, and while I think I understand that now, it's something I don't think I'd have been able to figure out easily on my own. Or, again, in your delegates talk, how using Unity Events would be slower than delegates, and delegates slower than checking bools, etc.

    --
    More broadly, I think tutorials usually only teach software, or a specific technique of doing something, and arguably aren't that well suited to evaluating things, or teaching creativity or game design or artistic sensitivity, but it'd be interesting if there was a way to do those too... :P
  • Very interested in all of those things!
  • I would love more tutorials on physics in Unity please (outside of the normal unity stuff). :D
  • From the ones you listed, tools and maths spark my interest.
  • For me tools and optimization. All the others would be cool as well!
  • edited
    But there are already lots of books that cover everything you have mentioned above. So I am very skeptical about online tutorials since most of them will throw lot of code at you and fail to explain it. And because of this many beginners will think games are extremely hard to make and kind of just give up. So mostly when beginners ask me for advace, I always refer them to "Rex van der Spuy's Book... And ones they have solid knowledge, they can start looking at tutorials.
  • @SkinnyBoy: I think in general people don't find online tutorials as bad as you, and in fact probably more approachable than physical books. Personally I would rather scan through an online tutorial instead of picking up a book
  • edited
    @SkinnyBoy: I think that's completely backwards. I don't think you can know something is worth the "in-depth" knowledge of reading a book until you've had a taster of what it's like. If you're min-maxing your time and energy for the best result for effort put in, I think quick tuts are far superior to courses and books, at least initially. When you've had a taster of something (e.g. via a tut), and realise it's something you find useful and want to learn more about, then the energy investment of poring over a book (which can still be a great source of learning; not saying books aren't good) becomes far easier to justify.
  • Math topics - however your list is great - would read them all.
  • Thanks for your feedback guys :) Time to get to typing!

    I'm going to start with a tools tutorial that involves some math (mostly equations of motion) and take it from there
    Thanked by 2critic Sash
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