The Junior Programmer Pathway in Unity is a long one, but I learned a lot about programming and the game engine itself. We were taught about the importance of variables in your code, and how they could be applied in the engine (private v. public), and different types of variables such as float, int, bool, etc. We learned how to make objects transform, and cause collisions due to the colliders in Unity. We even touched on audio and animation and how the engine and the IDE work together to bring the game to life. As the pathway went on debugging became easier even though the content got harder, and I found myself looking at hints for these debugging challenges less and less frequently. I became more familiar with C# and was also able to work more quickly as time went on and that familiarity grew. I think anyone who's spent time with any programming language can agree it's always the tiny, (seemingly) insignificant, and unnoticeable errors that are the most frequent and frustrating to deal with. Dealing with these types of mistakes myself made an already lengthy process far longer. Exhibit A: the semi-colon. Below is the script I made this error on, and as you can see there is an if statement under update. After a certain point of cramming programming work you get a bit too comfortable adding semi-colons at the end of lines, so much so that you may accidentally find yourself putting them where they don't belong, without even realizing it. That was the mistake I made when putting a semi-colon after the first line of the aforementioned if statement. This completely ruined my game in Unity, and I was left for 15 minutes attempting to figure out where I went wrong if all of my code looked good. Once I realized what I had done I was left to ponder where I went wrong in a different way. Aside from this another difficulty I encountered was when we were introduced to tags and how they could be used in scripts. Exhibit B: capitalization. Now, around the same time we were taught how to use tags in Unity and how to make our script recognize them, we were also taught about the GameObject.Find function which used the name of the object in the Unity hierarchy. This shouldn't be any issue as anyone without a smooth, sleep-deprived brain should recognize that the tag you put on an object should have the same name as the object itself so that even if you accidentally mix up the two in your head it wouldn't be a problem. It was a problem for me. If you can see that "Obstacle at the bottom of the script below, you might notice the O is capitalized, which is how I made the tag on the obstacle object in Unity. My mistake was giving the object tag a capital O rather than lowercase, which it was in the hierarchy, then forgetting about it and then conflating object name and object tag even though the function CompareTag was right in front of me. This error, like the previous, wasted a lot of time. In Summary:
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With this final quarter wrapping up the school year, you would expect it to feel that way; it doesn't. This year online has been an odd and difficult one (for me anyway) and with so much less time in class both teachers and students are left to work until the very last minute. Even still, the work I managed to get done this year for game design is incredibly important, especially the information learned in the Junior Programmer Pathway which we are just wrapping up. In a year that mostly felt like a blur, I feel I learned a lot after this class after picking up Unity and C#, and since next year we will be utilizing these newly learned tools, I regret all those sleepless nights just a slight bit less. I look forward to being able to take AGAD next year, because as we will be going into the hopefully normal school year being familiar with Unity we will have a lot more time and capabilities to get things done, and do them well. This year we didn't have the time to get our own games going, or touch on the post-production process like we did the pre and production processes, but that's just another reason to look ahead to next year, and maybe even work on my own projects on my own time during the summer.
In Summary:
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About meI am a Senior at DSA and currently taking the Advanced Game Art and Design course. I enjoy playing video games and drawing in my free time. The opinions expressed within this blog are my own, and do not reflect that of Durham School of the Arts of Durham Public Schools Archives
May 2022
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