It's Monday... I know. But what better day to start the week with a blog post about the thing that saves you from writing the same chunk of code 50 times across your project: methods in C#. If you've ever copy-pasted a block of code into three different scripts and then had to fix a bug in all three places separately, this one's for you. We're going over what it is exactly, and the best way to implement methods when you're building your program.
Let's go!
TGIF! Welcome to another blog post about a question nearly every beginner Unity dev asks at some point: should this be an array or a List? And if you're absolutely new to coding, what is it exactly? If you've ever stared at an inventory system or a spawn pool wondering which one to reach for, you're in the right place.
Let's go over this together!
It's Friday!! And welcome to another blog post about a piece of logic you'll write more than almost anything else in your game: if statements in C#. If you've built even a tiny prototype in Unity, you've already written dozens of these without necessarily thinking about the "why" behind them: checking if the player's health hit zero, checking if a key was pressed, checking if an enemy is in range.
Let's dive in!
We're going over the 4 major types of loops you need to know. If you've ever found yourself copy-pasting the same line of code five, ten, or twenty times just to do the same thing over and over, you're about to feel a little silly, because that's exactly what loops are built to solve.
Let's dive in!
int score = 0; without really knowing why it works, or why it had to be int and not something else. Alright, that's fair; hardly anybody explains it well the first time around. Maybe I can shine some light on this topic.
You've probably heard of Object Oriented Programming, but what does it mean exactly? One may think it's pretty obvious. Well, it's not. OOP is one of those terms that gets thrown around in job listings and Reddit threads until it stops meaning anything.
Here's the thing though: Unity is built on OOP. Every MonoBehaviour you've ever written is a class. Every GameObject you drag components onto is basically a walking demonstration of composition. So whether you've been "using OOP" on purpose or by accident, you've already got your hands dirty.
The 4 principles; encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism, and abstraction, all sound like you need a degree in computer programming - but after reading this article, you'll be surprised how simple it really is. They're the difference between a codebase you can expand on for years and one that collapses the moment you add a third enemy type. Let's go through them one at a time, Unity-style.
Welcome to another blog post about the stuff that quietly runs your entire game, whether you think about it or not. This Wednesday's topic: understanding the game loop in Unity; Awake, Start, Update, FixedUpdate, LateUpdate, OnEnable, OnDisable, Reset, teardown methods, coroutines, and a peek at the rendering callbacks.
If you've ever wondered why your player controller moves like it's had too much coffee on some frames and none on others, or why a script that "should" be running just... isn't, chances are you've got a game loop misunderstanding on your hands.
This stuff isn't glamorous, but it's foundational. Get it wrong, and every system you build on top of it inherits the wobble.
Let's have a closer look at how it all works together.
Welcome to another blog post about one of those C# topics that trips up almost every solo game developer at some point: delegates, events, Action, and Func. If you've ever stared at a tutorial and thought "okay but why would I use this over just calling a method directly," well, ..you're in the right place.
Let's take a look shall we?
Welcome to another blog post about Unity for absolute beginners. If you've searched around for "how to start Unity," you already know the drill: install the engine, drag a cube into the scene, slap a Rigidbody on it, write ten lines of code to make it jump. Video over, you made the thing move, it feels really productive right?
That's actually how I started learning Unity as well. But I was struggling really bad. I could not wrap my head around what and why things were happening. Now, that I have been using Unity to design my games for over 6 years, I understand what my biggest issue was trying to learn the engine. That's why my teaching method is a different from all the others out there.
Here's the problem, and I understand why most people would quit after taking a course or two. Not because Unity is too hard, but because nobody explained what's actually happening under the hood before throwing them at the code editor. You can't debug what you don't understand, and you definitely can't build anything beyond a tutorial's exact steps if you don't know why those steps exist in that order.
So my approach is unusual. At this stage you don't have to learn how to make the player jump. Instead I'm going to cover the three things I wish someone had explained to me before I touched a single script: the game loop, how references work, and why starting stupidly small is the actual skill that separates people who finish games from people who don't.
Let's dive in!
Welcome to another blog post about writing Unity code that doesn't make you want to throw your laptop out the window. Today's topic: state machines in Unity!
If you've ever written a PlayerController with six bools (isJumping, isRunning, isAttacking, isDead, isReallyDead, isDefinitelyDeadThisTime) and a 100-line Update() full of nested if statements, this one's for you.
Let's have a look!