When we started this Capstone project, we were bouncing ideas around left and right without a care. My team came up with so many great concepts, and we had this huge pile of potential in front of us. Then, we had to figure out how to turn that gooey heap of ideas into something real, clean, and usable.

The problem for me was that I’ve never, before this project, ever done game development. I had no idea what type of engines were even out there. I didn’t know how to pick a tech stack for this, because I felt like I had absolutely no frame of reference. So, as soon as I found out that one of my group members had experience with Unity, that was enough for me! I took off on a mission to learn Unity (and C#) so that I could be ready to contribute as soon as development started.

Obviously I started by downloading Unity. I got it set up pretty easily by following their instructions. Then I was ready to practice with it, right?

Absolutely not.

The learning curve is more of a cliff in Unity development. Right away I had no direction. I felt lost, and after reading the docs, I still had no real clue how to use it. I actually really started to panic because I felt like there was no way I was going to be able to contribute anything meaningful to this project – I thought I had just gotten in way over my head. I was questioning why I thought I could ever have a career in a tech field, if I couldn’t figure out how to use a piece of software. Nothing in the docs was making sense to me. I was in the middle of this breakdown when I stumbled onto a random Unity forum… Full of more of me.

As it turns out, I’m not the only one who has had a difficult time getting into a new piece of technology and also the world actually wasn’t ending. The learning curve for Unity feels steep partially because it is, and partially because of all the different things this engine is capable of. I understand why the docs didn’t cover it all – they couldn’t, as people are building new extensions for this software constantly and figuring out how to use it for bigger and better projects. I picked up some tips from people who had similar issues getting started, and suddenly I had my footing.

Now, halfway into the development phase, I’m loving this engine. Unity can do everything we need for our project, and debugging turned out to be extremely straightforward once I actually figured out how to do it. Just this week we found a performance analyzer tool tucked into the development kit, and were able to use that to identify a part of our system which was causing major issues with lagging.

Looking back now, I wish I had not panicked so hard that I started doubting my own intelligence. Although this software took me a while to get oriented to, once I got my bearings it turned out to be a breeze. Now, I have enough experience with it that I would be more than comfortable using it for future projects. I think I learned a lot from this experience, and I am going to try to be a bit more gentle with myself moving forward. As I learn more about Unity, I realize that there are many people like myself who had no idea where to start.

I think this experience with self-taught Unity development has really bolstered my confidence in my own ability to learn new things. New things are always hard, and this has shown me that I’m not the only one who thinks so. But, new things are definitely doable.

Overall, I’m a huge fan of Unity now. Despite the steep learning curve, I really have come to appreciate all that this software can do.