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I learned Unity the wrong way

darkounity.com

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Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#11

Post by shermantanktop »

__natty__ wrote: post #7

> But interview after interview, the story started to make sense. They were not wrong, I was not ready, and it took me a long time to admit that. I believe this is one of the most humbling but also maturing moments in career and adulthood.

There are activities where this type of realization is constant, and activities where it is rare.

Interviewing a marketing manager is dominated vibes and optics, and driving that clarity about what their actual skills are is an uphill battle. With a software engineer I can usually get there in a few minutes.

But many creative activities are susceptible to avoiding harsh realizations. And tfa was about the creative side of gamedev.

That doesn’t mean that engineers are better than English majors. If anything, technical people should have more respect for great creative talents, because those people got almost no feedback and still figured out how to become great.

Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#12

Post by ivanjermakov »

andai wrote: post #5

What nobody told him is that it doesn't matter. The most beloved games have the shittest code. The goals of getting a job in the industry, and making a game people love, have completely different requirements, with surprisingly little overlap. --- As for the latter (game industry requirements) I read this article a while back. https://lazyfoo.net/articles/article11_top-ten-mistakes-game... There's a great list of Fun…

> The most beloved games have the shittest code

Do you have data supporting that? My favorite games (Factorio, Noita, Song of Syx to name a few) all share in common devs' passion and expertise. I don't have any example of a good game with shitty code.

Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#13

Post by jiggawatts »

shermantanktop wrote: post #11
__natty__ wrote: post #7

> But interview after interview, the story started to make sense. They were not wrong, I was not ready, and it took me a long time to admit that. I believe this is one of the most humbling but also maturing moments in career and adulthood.

There are activities where this type of realization is constant, and activities where it is rare. Interviewing a marketing manager is dominated vibes and optics, and driving that clarity about what their actual skills are is an uphill battle. With a software engineer I can usually get there in a few minutes. But many creative activities are susceptible to avoiding harsh realizations. And tfa was about the creative si…

Marketing is easy, just ask the interviewee what metrics they use in their job. If they can answer (at all), hire them.

The expected answer is something like LTV/CAC.

Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#14

Post by bambataa »

Extremely well-written and honest post.

The struggle with being self-taught is that you don’t know what you don’t know. This is probably even worse in areas like Unity, where the coding part is sort of a sideshow to the main event. Nowadays the problem is you lack the discernment to evaluate AI output.

I wrote The Conputer Science Book (https://a.co/d/01e62STx) to act as that basic building block and help orient self-taught developers.

What did come out from the blog post though:

- OP writes really well

- OP has learned to be very honest with themselves (and I hope not too self-critical now)

- OP seems really good at delivering things people like, even if they’re a bit cobbled together

All of which are very valuable and harder to learn than programming fundamentals tbh.

Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#15

Post by sudokatsu »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #12
andai wrote: post #5

What nobody told him is that it doesn't matter. The most beloved games have the shittest code. The goals of getting a job in the industry, and making a game people love, have completely different requirements, with surprisingly little overlap. --- As for the latter (game industry requirements) I read this article a while back. https://lazyfoo.net/articles/article11_top-ten-mistakes-game... There's a great list of Fun…

> The most beloved games have the shittest code Do you have data supporting that? My favorite games (Factorio, Noita, Song of Syx to name a few) all share in common devs' passion and expertise. I don't have any example of a good game with shitty code.

The Simpson’s Hit & Run and Fallout 3 come to mind

Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#16

Post by LarsDu88 »

andai wrote: post #5

What nobody told him is that it doesn't matter. The most beloved games have the shittest code. The goals of getting a job in the industry, and making a game people love, have completely different requirements, with surprisingly little overlap. --- As for the latter (game industry requirements) I read this article a while back. https://lazyfoo.net/articles/article11_top-ten-mistakes-game... There's a great list of Fun…

I feel there was a very narrow time window in the 90s when a bunch of game franchises were started where the devs could get away with shipping stuff with a ton of bugs. The first two Fallout games come to mind. So does the original Deus Ex. This is definitely the exception not the rule though! Hardware constraints weed out shitty (or at the very least suboptimal) code very quickly.

This is the exception not the rule however. If there's one unifying thing about games that succeed despite major issues with the code its that the developers tend to have extensive experience playing board games and can make a compelling gaming experience without having a game with all the bells and whistles.

Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#17

Post by LarsDu88 »

sudokatsu wrote: post #15
ivanjermakov wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most beloved games have the shittest code Do you have data supporting that? My favorite games (Factorio, Noita, Song of Syx to name a few) all share in common devs' passion and expertise. I don't have any example of a good game with shitty code.

The Simpson’s Hit & Run and Fallout 3 come to mind

The entire Fallout series, lol.

Just played Fallout 2, and there's still unpatched game breaking bugs in there.

Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#18

Post by cubefox »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #12
andai wrote: post #5

What nobody told him is that it doesn't matter. The most beloved games have the shittest code. The goals of getting a job in the industry, and making a game people love, have completely different requirements, with surprisingly little overlap. --- As for the latter (game industry requirements) I read this article a while back. https://lazyfoo.net/articles/article11_top-ten-mistakes-game... There's a great list of Fun…

> The most beloved games have the shittest code Do you have data supporting that? My favorite games (Factorio, Noita, Song of Syx to name a few) all share in common devs' passion and expertise. I don't have any example of a good game with shitty code.

There are countless great games with a lot of bugs and performance problems. Maybe most of them have pretty code behind the scenes, but I doubt it.

Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#19

Post by jeremyjh »

andai wrote: post #5

What nobody told him is that it doesn't matter. The most beloved games have the shittest code. The goals of getting a job in the industry, and making a game people love, have completely different requirements, with surprisingly little overlap. --- As for the latter (game industry requirements) I read this article a while back. https://lazyfoo.net/articles/article11_top-ten-mistakes-game... There's a great list of Fun…

What TFA describes is not someone who wrote poor quality code, but someone who could write no code at all, before the era of AI.

Re: I learned Unity the wrong way

#20

Post by varun_ch »

I wonder how long/far someone can truly go without actually knowing stuff today. I don’t know about game dev but the web is certainly built on abstraction: In university I’ve met people whose portfolio sites are made in NextJS but don’t know what React, the DOM or even HTML is. I think this is bad. At the same time (with the help of AI) they are certainly shipping things and working real jobs.

At least on the web, with frameworks and stuff abstracted into magic services or libraries, you can go really far without knowing what you’re doing. At what point does not knowing the lower level stuff start becoming a hard ceiling?

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