No Better Time Than Now...Moving the Ball - Part 1

There is no perfect beginning to any great adventure. Looking upon this enormous blank canvas, hand quivering with hesitation of applying the first stroke.

Planning for Enodia VR began in January, 2016. What is Enodia VR? It is nothing but an idea at the moment. Though I have been working towards making it an actual product. Until I have something more concrete, I will wait to share those details.

While at CoderDojo yesterday, I had some free time since not many kids showed up, so I decided to take the plunge into Unity.

Roll a Ball Tutorial 1

There is the progress made so far. It looks like one of the main programming languages for this game engine is C#.

Programming the game physics is one of the coolest aspects of game development. Applying forces of movement and gravity to objects is incredibly exciting.

So far the learning curve seems steep. One of the challenges I would run into is accidentally changing the camera perspective to a sideview and then going back to the beginning of the tutorial because I no longer had a bird's eye view.

Every time I would start over, things did become easier as I uncovered more of Unity's features by exploring the buttons and remembering the steps, from changing the box layout to adding components and modifying their scripts / parameters.

One silly mistake I made was when I added the code for accepting user input from the keyboard arrows to move around the ball and kept hitting 'enter' and then 'play', only to find the ball wasn't moving. This was super frustrating, until finally I saw a parameter outside of the script itself that said 'speed: 0'. Well, that would explain it.

Sometimes learning new technical skills really exposes my primate genes. That is...the button mashing and blaming the computer when things don't go as expected. Then the lightbulb goes on and suddenly the world makes sense again.