2 Years of Learning Game Development in Unity | My devlog progress

i spent the past two years learning the unity game engine this is my journey from knowing absolutely nothing to being able to develop my dream game i'll explain the skills i learned each step of the way and share the resources that i use to learn them this is two years of learning unity this all began back in march of 2020 when the pandemic first hit i was trapped inside and i couldn't see any of the friends that i don't have so when a game i enjoyed released a new update allowing you to add mods i immediately got all excited i had tons of great ideas for features but there's one problem to actually mod the game you had to download this tool called unity i took one look at it realized i had no idea what i was doing and thus my game dev journey began the earliest projects find on my hard drive are these cursed combinations of code that was taken from a tower defense tutorial with some handful of random assets thrown in overall it's pretty ugly whatever was going on but for the first few weeks i really had no idea what i was doing after that i spent several months diving into a proper prototype that was an advanced wars clone but in 3d and with a bit of a cyberpunk aesthetic i learned a bunch of basic concepts in unity but it was very very slow progress and this was fine as an experimentation process as i had no idea what i was doing or how unity even worked i spent most of my time working on making it look nice so i could show off screenshots on like reddit and youtube but without spending enough time learning how to actually code the components of the game and i really didn't learn my lesson because i would repeat this mistake time and time again you can also see here i have really no concept of optimization and this disaster runs on my 3080 at under 30 fps also looking back at my code jeez yeah i mean honestly it's kind of therapeutic to see how far i've come i did discover though while working on this project that i would have to consider the scope of the game whether it's campaigns factions missions this was all starting to look like an impossible task so i decided to back up start over with something a little smaller the next project i worked on was a fresh start where i wanted to experiment with some more city builder management type concepts i started keeping a log of what i was doing in discord which is cool because now we can look back and see the progress as it happened i coded a building system that allows you to place different structures on a grid i also created a very basic economy with the buildings contributing to this system and as you can see i discovered how to use bloom in post-processing and i've been a little too obsessed with it ever since from a narrative standpoint the player is striving to grow a city while also keeping the corporations happy these corpos provide the city with jobs and resources and thus you must balance the population's needs and wants with the corporate greed however a major lesson that i learned was don't spend all of your time focusing on minor tweaks like ui and effects but to focus my early development into building a proper foundation for the game to be built off of a lot of the ui you see here is just placeholder text with nothing to back it up however one thing that i was really proud of from this project was this road connection system that would dynamically update to match the neighboring tiles and it seems you know pretty simple now but at that time it was one of the first major things that i'd coded all by myself and i was really happy with it the next stepping stone was a tower defense with dnd classes concept that i had worked out now this is where i began to understand that i wasn't going to get anywhere with the very limited knowledge of unity that i had so i started scrounging youtube for tutorials and found our lord and savior brackies a lot of code you see here was originally learned in his tower defense series i added a few different tower types enemy types maps etc my main takeaway from this side project was that i don't know what i don't know and if you take one thing away from this video this is the most important thing that i've learned in the past two years i didn't know how to fully take advantage of unity and thus i was severely limited in what i could create due to not knowing the game engine you'll see that over the course of 2021 i was constantly trying to expose myself to the different features that unity offers it's fun to pull up these projects and record videos because i'm seeing bugs that i now know how to fix like you see these little guys bouncing up and down i just need to turn off the use gravity in their rigid bodies and there it's all good and the easiest way to discover all this is through youtube tutorials so now that i got one hit of that unity youtube juice like a north philly crack fiend i crave the next one in february of 2021 i found a new youtube series by sebastian graves titled how to make dark souls in unity i glitched through the 40 episodes that he had released at that time looking at it now he's up to around 100 and using that as a base i started to work on a game i called torny manager you'd recruit fighters and train them and then fight with them or watch and coach view as your fighters did battle some of the highlights of this game are a very cool ai state machine system that was originally brilliantly designed by sebastian that i was able to take and run with i was able to create intelligent enemy combatants that would dodge your attacks or chase after the player this youtube series introduced me to a ton of features that unity offered that i didn't even know existed from different animation layers to how to properly structure your project to scriptable objects this tutorial series is absolutely incredible and i highly highly highly recommend anyone new to unity go ahead and check it out even if you have no interest in dark souls as you know i myself have actually never beaten any of the games what this tutorial series teaches you is absolutely unparalleled on youtube i don't think you can learn this much from watching anything else i did get a little bored from working on it for so many months straight so i took a little break over the summer to work on a different project enter cyber chef god i love how i made this menu look this prototype caused me to delve into a cyberpunk themed world where you would go around and collect ingredients for your uh recipe these ingredients were obtained from trading with sketchy merchants growing plants disassembling missiles deconstructing batteries etc i was watching a lot of gta rp on twitch at that time and having a team of people work together to create a batch of um stuff was pretty entertaining so i wanted to take a shot at recreating that feeling in this game i created little mini games for the players to each participate in to obtain resources such as memorizing numbers in a row or remembering the correct layout of tiles and all of these ingredients were combined in a homemade nuclear reactor to produce a dish that contains only legal substances of course so i soon learned though that multiplayer is a lot and i mean a lot more complicated than i thought after experimenting with it for a bit and trying to learn how all these rpc calls and stuff are all set up i realized i'd bitten off way more than i could chew and i decided to step back from this project for the moment regardless though i'm very proud of the level design i did here i took a lot of inspiration from shows like altered carbon and the densely packed alleyways of the former kowloon walled city in hong kong [Music] i also built a proper waypoint and quest system so even though this project isn't going to be taken any further a lot of what i learned and a lot of the code i wrote can actually be reused in a later project at this point in 2021 i wanted to continue filling out my unity tool belt with enough instruments to make even bob the builder blush i follow the procedural terrain generation tutorials by sebastian laig in this series he teaches you the basics of procedural generation along with how to apply it to meshes and add constraints i highly recommend you check this out if procedural generation is something that you've ever wanted to look into i was able to take what i learned and apply that to a grid based layout using some of the code from that old city builder i had worked on i tested out a few rts prototypes and again sorry for the low quality gifs this is all i have saved but if there's one project i'd like to revisit someday it's definitely this one it's a very similar to kingdoms and castles that one game that i originally got into unity to try to mod after that i hop back into the tournament management game i created a new indoor hub world for the player to visit between matches that was a tavern that you could go to to recruit new fighters buy new gear and manage your team i really loved the feel of this tavern environment and began imagining a game based around it but more on that later here you can see your team just chilling casually hanging out i'm very very proud of the ui i did here it's some of the best i've done so far but i know there's still plenty of room to improve all the icons are actual armor and weapons that i wrote a script to take screenshots of you can also update your fighter's gear here i then spent some time experimenting with motion matching for animations a process of procedurally blending animations to make changing directions and running appear much smoother it was cool to learn but ultimately really didn't fit in with a fast pace combat game i got some feedback from one of my friends that said my attacks just didn't have enough weight behind them so i cracked open youtube and spent hours watching videos of for honor a game with combat that is very juicy and has a very satisfying feeling when you hit your opponents i watched this frame by frame to try to understand what they did that makes it feel so good and then i tried to replicate that in my game i added directional hits a bit of blood and a quick screen flash and it looks so much better i then added some logic for capture points and the enemy units would avoid colliding with each other i created a new map implemented that capture point logic and ui and this is the most complete any project i've worked on has looked i did a new character select screen was experimenting a bit with picking different classes that would give you different loadouts like different heavy weapon class or a lighter arm class with a sword and shield and here you can see the capture point ui very happy with how that turned out overall i'm just thrilled with how this project's turned out so far and as you can see i really really enjoy using cinti assets [Music] around november i took another deviation to build a clone of we tanks i wanted to push myself and give learning multiplayer and unity another shot i tried implementing this using unity's netcode for game objects and i also tried to use their relay and lobby system for connections and i won't talk about this too much as i have a whole video on this channel detailing my learning process so if you're interested you can go check that out it's the first video i ever made though and it looks like trash but i did get local multiplayer working and i know fully online multiplayer is a whole different beast but i'm very happy with how far i got in this prototype and more importantly it gave me the confidence to work on a multiplayer focused game going forward [Music] finally we get to january of this year where i started work on tavern team tavern team revolves around running a medieval tavern with your friends i have a playlist of all the dev work i've done so far in this project but to provide you with just a brief overview gameplay loop revolves around customers who will enter your tavern and then wait in line to be served they'll order from a menu that you create ordering different types of ale or whole dishes and once you provide them with their order they will go and find a seat i've designed a system for refilling barrels when they run out along with a breath of the wild inspired cooking system that revolves around experimentation which i'll need to tweak this in the future to fit it a little closer with the theme but i'm pretty happy with it so far otherwise i've implemented animation rigging management base building aspects first person controls baked lighting i created a save system to save the player's data into a json file i've added rigid body physics such as throwing mugs the temporary ui was designed by studying ui designs of similar games i've been diving into multiplayer recently and it's super important to start building the game with multiplayer in mind at the beginning and it's a lot of work but i have a pretty good understanding of how all the different rpcs function and network objects from learning with that small wii tanks prototype tavern team is truly a culmination of all i've learned so far in unity using animation layers and an ai state machine from the tournament management game the world space ui and interactables from that cyber chef game and then the multiplayer which i was learning from the tanks i'm very excited with the progress so far and plan on continuing it into the future i may take a brief look into unity's dots in the future just to add another stack to the pile but that remains to be seen i've had a lot of help and learned from a lot of great people and tutorials on youtube and i highly encourage you to check out some of my favorites here if you enjoyed this feel free to drop a like or a sub it does make a huge difference for me anyways thank you for watching my two-year journey so far in unity um if you want to see more updates on tavern team there is a discord down below um it's honestly just a bunch of guys being dudes hanging out if you have any questions you can also jump in there and ask but thank you for watching have a great rest of your day

Channel: TJ

Views: 1,145,056

Keywords: Gamedev, Indiedev, Unity

Id: 8fcy0_FQ_OA

Length: 15min 21sec (921 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 17 2022