The Blog
This blog will initially be about my attempts to learn Unity and the language that drives it, C#. I have already gone through a “teach yourself” style book on C# and given my 20ish years (oh god) of previous development experience in various languages I already feel comfortable with it, but Unity is whole other beast entirely.
To that end, I’ve enrolled in a Unity course with the online learning platform Udemy. If you’re considering some online learning yourself, they seem to be a decent platform and I’m able to watch previously downloaded tutorials on my daily commute while following along on my laptop. Don’t ever pay full price for their courses though. There are frequent sales with huge discounts. When I enrolled I paid £20 for a course listed as £194, but two days after purchasing the price dropped even further to £11.99. So be patient. According to the app I’m 20% of the way through the course, so I’ll give some proper feedback on it after some additional progression.
Once I have a “firm” grasp of Unity, I’ll begin in earnest on developing the game I have in mind. It’s obviously waaaay to early to start talking about what that game will be, and it will most definitely evolve as I go along anyway but hopefully I’ll pick up enough knowledge through this and other courses I plan to take that will allow me to see my 5 year plan through to fruition.
Me
As mentioned, I’ve been a software developer for the past two decades. I started my work life as a web developer and while I still do a fair bit of that, I mostly work to integrate systems and develop/consume various API’s to make disparate applications play well together. I love my work, but I’ve always dreamed of making my own video game.
I’ve been an avid gamer since 1980 when I played an old ASCII mining game on our Commodore PET in my dad’s wood paneled office. We weren’t rich, my father was a very early computer science teacher at our local college and it was a “work device”. After that, we had an Intellivision in the very early 80’s followed by the NES towards the end of the decade. I followed the Nintendo consoles fairly closely after that. I bought my first PC in the mid 90’s and picked up the original XBox shortly after it’s release in the early aughts. Currently I have a Switch and a Vita which fit very nicely into my daily commute, and the Switch is basically a dream come true in terms of use cases for me.
Beyond that, I’m a happily married father of 1. I was born and lived the first 23 years of my life in Canada, then I spent a few years in the Caribbean before settling in the UK more than a decade ago. I’m obviously interested in video games, but also photography, fencing and skiing. But to be honest, most of my the free time I used to devote to these pursuits is now dedicated to my family and I wouldn’t have it any other way!