Welp, here I am at Grandma’s house. Grandma’s at a ripe old age and we only get two days with her before having to zip home for Christmas so I spent the entire day in her company, meaning I have to do my video tonight. But like I explained before, I’m at grandma’s now, far away from the prepared desktop and sitting idly with my slowass cannot-do-Unity laptop.

But here’s where the “Don’t break the chain” system works its magic, because I want to keep the chain going so bad I watched a video even though I can’t do it! We covered variables, got to watch him define the variable “max” as the highest number the player can choose, and “min” the lowest number (ie 1). Then we got it to print some things. Except I didn’t, I just followed along but I totally knew how to do that beforehand so we’re not surfing into totally new territory or anything.

Chain is unbroken, even if it’s got some pretty weak links slinking along right now. Probably not the best time to add ten pushups a day like I was toying with doing.

Yeah, day 14 is the same premise as day 13. Lemme explain;

So yesterday I put all that shit on my laptop so I’ll have a laptop, but it was super slow. This isn’t a great laptop, the reason I put my Unity plans on hold before was because Unity was freaking laggy and bloated and everything took forever to do. So I waited until I got my new desktop for my birthday.

But now I’m at my parent’s house and said desktop is in Austin but I realized “Hey! I can use my mom’s Apple desktop!” So today I spent way too long installing Unity and making all the dumb stuff for the third time. And GUESS WHAT we go driving to grandma’s tomorrow, aka a place that DOESN’T have the desktop I just blew a bunch of time developing on, so I’m restricted again to my damn laptop. I don’t know if I can code on it, I really don’t.

But I will. Because nobody said coding was easy, and I’m not breaking the chain for anything, especially not wimpy problems like below-average hardware. We’re making a console game for god’s sake, I’m just gonna tank through it. And then eventually I can fly home and do all of it again as I update my actually-decent desktop! 😀 Gotta love programming!

In other news, got to see Star Wars Force Awakens. It was pretty awesome, deserves all the money it’s making.

I rewatched yesterday’s video and just retraced the steps instead of moving onto a new video. Still technically didn’t break the chain (after all, I said I’d watch a video a day, didn’t say a NEW video) and I just flew home to California so I’ve been on planes all day. So I had to recreate Number Wizard into this new computer. I’m ready to actually move forward tomorrow, but it’s gonna be painful these next nine days cause this laptop is sooooooo slow…

Still, nobody ever said genius was easy.

Oh god I don’t want to do this oh god I can’t do this no this is where i gave up last time it’s too hard I can’t I don’t want to please I’m sorry

Ahem.

Today we began SCRIPTING. In case you forgot from yesterday,  we’re making a game where the Number Wizard can guess your number in 30 questions or less. To that effect we created a new game, gave it an empty object, gave that object a script, and added some simple code that made a “Welcome to Number Wizard!” line of text appear. Then we played it and it worked :3

That was a lot easier than I expected. Thank god I didn’t quit at this stage like I did last time because SCRIPTING reared its ugly head.

Ignore the dates claiming I’m late, I know I’m late but I haven’t gone to bed yet so technically it’s still the same day.

Today was an introduction to Course 2, scripting. Today we just had an introduction video explaining what’s going to happen and how everybody’s scared of scripting but it’s best to get it out of the way first. Fair enough. Our first game’s going to be a number-guessing game where it can guess our number in thirty questions or less. This is awesome because it ties into an idea I had for a game that was a total ripoff of Guess Who? but on Steam or something. So I’ll be paying close attention. See you tomorrow! Stuff’s getting real!

We completed Course 1 today, meaning the assignments were to review the list of useful links to have and a quiz which went over the first course. I got all the questions right except the one asking if Angry Bots comes bundled with all Unities. Turns out it does not.

Beginning Course 2 tomorrow, which covers Basic Scripting. Awesome. Let’s get the ball rolling on some code. I’m a bit nervous because I leave on the 20th to visit the folks for holiday, but I’ll just find a way to get a video in there every day. Might be a bit weird but I don’t want to break the chain, it’s now in the double-digits!

Today we covered saving, closing down Unity, and opening it back up! I think the director assumes you’re doing this faster than one video a day as I’ve already done all those things before.

Today we went over the MonoUnity developer, the first thing that looks like it actually has code in it. Specifically C sharp.We learned some useful keyboard shortcuts like Alt and we learned never to use spaces, Tabs instead. We also set our preferences to auto-indent for aesthetic purposes. See you tomorrow!

Today we went over the Unity menus and learned where everything was. Since he was on a Mac and I’m on PC it wasn’t so much “where everything was” as much as “the existence of stuff you might want to know about, good luck finding it.” First thing I did was change the shade color of the playmode tint to fuchsia because I love fuchsia way too much.

We also created our first project! And by ‘created’ I literally mean the act of making it an existing thing even without any content or features. Basically the same level of creation I’ve reached on almost every video game on this blog 😛 We also learned about the ‘modes’, ways of toggling what your cursor can interact with.

Since it seems we’re starting to get real important contenty stuff, Imma take this opportunity before things get real to describe the learning process I’m using. I didn’t know this method extended beyond myself, but when I mentioned to my roommate that I was doing a video a day (complete with a calendar that I got to mark a big X through each day), he described something he saw on Game Grumps called “Don’t break the chain“. Apparently invented by Jerry Seinfeld of all people, it encapsulates exactly my thought processes on forcing myself to learn Unity. I highly recommend it.

Today we’re discussing the differences between Mac and PC on Unity. The main things appear to be menus are setup a bit differently, and Mac tends to like creating new windows while PC likes embedding windows into itself, keeping everything a bit tighter at the cost of surfing using your start menu bar.

I can’t go more specific because I don’t want to give away the contents of the class. Sign up for it, it’s almost always on sale.