Day 1: First Unity Project – Roll a Ball

Today I started my first Unity project from a Roll a Ball tutorial.

Some notes:

• Scene navigation wasn’t really discussed (as far as I remember), so check out this link to see how you can zoom in & move around your scene. Most importantly option + drag and control + drag are two things you need to remember for scene navigation.
• After you create your game, you have to press play and use the left & right arrow keys to move the ball. This wasn’t apparent in the tutorial.

My first impression was that Unity really isn’t that hard. You download the personal Unity development kit and you can get started really easily. It’s even free.

The hard part so far was getting into the C# code. In the tutorial there was a lot of stuff I didn’t follow. But I think over time it will get easier for me to understand as I get repetition into all the nuances of the C# code. Having a PHP background, the syntax isn’t scary at all, but it’s all the different functions within C# and how they interact with Unity that are hard for me to grasp.

So far going through the tutorial, it seems very magical. I don’t understand a lot of the logic behind it. However, I believe this is normal and I’ll understand it more as time goes on.

What has been SUPER helpful is that I’m dual screening the tutorial as well as Unity. This has helped me watch the tutorial as I concurrently develop within the Unity platform.

Today I spent about 30 minutes in the tutorial and I stopped at the section where I’m going to learn how to move the camera (so far I’ve only learned how to move the ball).

PS. Shout out to Dr. Kitodai at Imagine VR for helping me get started in VR today.