My Experience at WolverineSoft's Unity Game Engine Workshop
On October 19th I attended a Unity video game engine workshop on animation, physics and user interface given by the Wolverinesoft's club president, Thomas Bartlett. This workshop is part of a series that is being given on Thurdays from 7-8:30 in the Shapiro Design Lab's PIE (prototype, inspire, explore) Space. After the workshop is an open development session until 10:00pm where people can ask each other for game development help.
Why would you recommend this workshop to someone else?
I have done a lot of online tutorials through Unity's website and Youtube but they fall way short of doing a live workshop. If you are in a big city or near a University there is a good chance you will have a game development group on or off campus that will offer something similar. When I worked at as a lab manager at the University of Riverside I learned so much by working on my first video game project Last Forest of the Jama Coaque by being part of Gamespawn's student group's community. Having a group a of friends to work around can not only help cut the time it takes to debug something from days to minutes but it also is psychologically important when taking on the sometimes overwhelming task of creating a video game in your free time. I have noticed that Meetup.com also has groups like these off-campus. So if you are lucky to be able to I highly recommend you attend a live workshop. The one given by WolverineSoft was particularly good in covering a lot of content and making me feel like I know a lot less about Unity than I thought. I also saw just how slow I do things in Unity. This is something that inspired me because I am hopeful that as I get better versed in Unity I will be able to develop games faster. Even working half as fast or fluently as the Thomas led the workshop would save so much time and allow you to develop so much better games!
Really grateful to Thoma Bartlett and Wolverinesoft for putting on this workshop and creating the fun community of hobbyist and aspiring student game developers.
Why would you recommend this workshop to someone else?
I have done a lot of online tutorials through Unity's website and Youtube but they fall way short of doing a live workshop. If you are in a big city or near a University there is a good chance you will have a game development group on or off campus that will offer something similar. When I worked at as a lab manager at the University of Riverside I learned so much by working on my first video game project Last Forest of the Jama Coaque by being part of Gamespawn's student group's community. Having a group a of friends to work around can not only help cut the time it takes to debug something from days to minutes but it also is psychologically important when taking on the sometimes overwhelming task of creating a video game in your free time. I have noticed that Meetup.com also has groups like these off-campus. So if you are lucky to be able to I highly recommend you attend a live workshop. The one given by WolverineSoft was particularly good in covering a lot of content and making me feel like I know a lot less about Unity than I thought. I also saw just how slow I do things in Unity. This is something that inspired me because I am hopeful that as I get better versed in Unity I will be able to develop games faster. Even working half as fast or fluently as the Thomas led the workshop would save so much time and allow you to develop so much better games!
What were the goals of the workshop?
This workshop was an introduction to Unity's animation, physics and UI. It was meant for beginners so Thomas is careful to make sure everyone is caught up to him and is happy to repeat himself as much as necessary to get everyone on track.
Why did you choose to attend this workshop?
I want to get better at using Unity for my game lab residency project, a video game called Climate Crisis.
What's the best/coolest thing you learned during the workshop?
It was all very helpful but I was most excited about a feature of Unity called "layer-based collision detection" that allows you partition different objects within different layers and then select if the physics system allows them to collide. It might not sound too exciting but it is enormously helpful for some unsolved problems I have had in the past and something that I know I will use a lot going forward.
What can you do now that you couldn't before?
In addition to the "layer-based collision detection" feature the workshop taught us how to better organize game creation assets within thematic categories like "player", "enemy", "ball" rather than the more typical organization of functional categories like "audio", "[code] scripts", "prefab[ricated game objects]." This makes a lot of sense and should save time. Also, Thomas taught us to use the animator feature to give life to our box player by using a blend tree to combine the motions of jumping up and falling down through the arch of the player's jump.
Really grateful to Thoma Bartlett and Wolverinesoft for putting on this workshop and creating the fun community of hobbyist and aspiring student game developers.
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