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4 hours ago, Rilen said:

Hey guys, I'm working on the Survival Shooter and there's something I need help on. The colors in my scene are much much lighter than what I'm seeing in the tutorial, and game objects don't appear to be casting shadows. Root, you're finished product on Itch doesn't appear to have shadows either. Are we missing something?

EDIT: Dammit, something really weird is happening. The correct darkness and shadows pop in only when I'm running the game and the player dies then it restarts. On my "2nd life" everything looks much better. Going through to watch everything to see what changes but baffled. 

 

What function are you using to restart the game upon death?

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None, as far as I know. I haven't intentionally done anything in that regard and I haven't yet activated any of the scripts for GameOver. So I'm pretty confused as to what is happening. 

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On 10/27/2016 at 10:06 AM, Rilen said:

Hey guys, I'm working on the Survival Shooter and there's something I need help on. The colors in my scene are much much lighter than what I'm seeing in the tutorial, and game objects don't appear to be casting shadows. Root, you're finished product on Itch doesn't appear to have shadows either. Are we missing something?

EDIT: Dammit, something really weird is happening. The correct darkness and shadows pop in only when I'm running the game and the player dies then it restarts. On my "2nd life" everything looks much better. Going through to watch everything to see what changes but baffled. 

 

I'm guessing you reload the scene right? You're probably seeing bugs related to light map baking. You might find you don't have this problem when you build the project to an application, you might also find if you open the lighting window, and change the baking mode from auto to manual, you won't have this problem. I wish i could give a more definitive answer, but, I don't have a comprehensive idea how this works, and have been struggling with it myself!

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Would anyone in Wizard Academy be interested in a Common Room? Thinking about making a Slack channel that's for Academy talk. It seems like a lot of these tutorials are partially obsolete or obtuse, and having someone to talk to while doing it could be mutually beneficial. Also if, like me, you're looking to put your own spin on these it could be a nice play to discuss modifiers and extra credit touches.  Anyone interested or should we keep just using the thread? 

 

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Alright, I finished the Survival Shooter!

I really did not enjoy this one. After the last 2, being given everything and just clicking the pieces in place was frustrating and I felt that I learned much less. Also a ton of stuff is not in the tutorial but is present in the game files. I did what I could, managed to reverse engineer the intended pause menu and audio mixing, but the whole thing felt like a pain. Learning about animation was easily the most fascinating and fun part, for me. Can't wait to get back to more coding, I might try to do a coding-specific tutorial series before tackling Tanks. 

This dude did something pretty neat with the tutorial. He added death animation, spookier lighting, glowy eyes, enemy waves, pickups, all kinds of fun stuff! You can download the project and crack it open to look around. I hope to implement some of it mine later on but for now I am just done with this damn shooter and ready to move on. Hope everyone else is rocking along, and again let me know if anyone else would like a Slack channel for this. 

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Okay it looks like I mostly finished tanks in October before I fell off the wagon, I went through the final chapter of tutorial today and packaged it up and uploaded it.

 

So next up for me is 2D Roguelike, which I'm slightly less excited about because 3d is more my favorite dish but we'll see. Maybe it will be short?

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I should post my Tanks soon. I'm super excited about the Survival one because I am very interested in learning procedural generation and roguelike structure. 

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I'm just about done with 2d roguelike and I'm hating it with a fiery intensity, not because it is 2d but because there's very little instruction being given on what any of the coding elements are actually for, beyond what they're meant to do in the game.  I think I'm gonna take a D on this one for partial completion and move on to the next assignment.

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As I'm drawing close to the end of the existing Unity tutorial projects I'm wanting to dig into something a little bit meatier for continued learning. There are of course also the tutorials broken down by specific topic in the official Unity tutorial set to dig into, which I'm increasingly feeling like maybe I ought to have done more of while working through the projects, but I mean, it's not too late.

 

But these are the tutorial series that I've kept bookmarked for jumping into:

 

Wicked Cat Studios - Unity 5 Beginner to Pro (youtube)

Any of the youtube courses from Brackeys

Walker Brothers - Learn Unity

 

And I seem to remember the Walker Brothers tutorial set coming from a recommendation on the slack? So that's the one I'm leaning most favorably toward at the moment.  There's a couple of books I've got wishlisted on Amazon that I'm also wanting to dig into, but for the purpose of this thread I wanna stick to stuff that's freely accessible.

 

Anyway: if any other thumbs have suggestions for learning resources to continue with Unity studies, I will add them to the pile.

 

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What kind of deeper dives are you looking to do?  Something specifically with Unity or programming generally?  In either case, I tend to recommend http://www.3dbuzz.com/ since they place a strong emphasis on both practical application and coding practices with exhaustive explanation, which seem trivial or perhaps frustrating when you're first getting into programming but are hugely beneficial later on.

 

Beyond that, if you're comfortable enough with programming/reading code and working with Unity to strike out on your own, I'd recommend just trying to recreate a mechanic from some game you like.  Also, a great resource for figuring out how to take the next step is something called .net reflector if you can spend the money, or http://ilspy.net/ for an open source solution.  Then head on over to steam and pick up Bastion from Supergiant games if you don't own it already (or pick up the demo), decompile their dlls and take a look.  Really any C#/.net assembly will work, I only suggest Bastion because it's what I did when I was learning to program.  You might not be able to understand it all just yet, but I personally found it helpful to understand what a fully fledged game project looks like.  I found the hardest thing to learn about game development generally wasn't how to get started, everyone and their mother seems to have a guide for that, it's how to go from the Hello world style projects to something that has interacting systems, game rules, and so on.

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I wound up getting The Unity 5 Animation Cookbook shortly before Christmas and have been digging into that instead of the rest of the unity project-based tutorials, and I've been digging it a lot. I don't think I'm gonna dip into any of the other unity project tutorials from this point forward because I kind of feel like I've basically plumbed the depths of what they have to offer now. The recreating of game mechanics and trying to implement some of my own ideas sounds good to me.

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