I was going to do a follow-up post to my last one on Time Management, but in view of a recent development I thought it would be more interesting to post about what I'm working on instead.
Unity 3.5 Public Beta - New 'Flash Target'
I get a lot of e-mails and even more Reader Posts. Lately, to stay focused, I have been deleting and skimming most of these. However, about five days ago, I got an e-mailed newsletter from Unity about the "Unity 3.5 Public Beta". The first thing I noticed was that this release of Unity now supports Flash as a target. I thought, "Hmm. Now I have to cover that target too when I do my review of Unity 3D." Yes, this is exciting news, but I am kind of on the fence about Flash. I know it is very powerful and it goes everywhere, but it is also a heavily developed for area. i.e. There is lots of competition in the Flash development space. That said, having another target you can simply build for with little to no extra work is great for Unity. So, I kept reading...
Yeah, baby!
Win $20,000!?
The next part of the newsletter really caught my eye. "Create and submit a Unity authored Flash ... best entry ... $20,000". Now I said, "Wow!"
It turns out that Unity is having a competition to help spread the word about the new feature(s) in this latest release. This is pretty cool. Also, even if one doesn't win the grand prize, there are some cool additional prizes.
So, since I'm already going to be reviewing Unity 3D as part of a learning experience, I figured why not at least try to making something. Of course the big challenges for me are:
- I have never (seriously) used Unity before.
- I'm not real familiar with Javascript (it's been years) or C# (shame on me, and I call myself a programmer.)
- I'm no artist.
Besides that, I've got this licked.
So, that's it. This is my first post on what should be a daily update of my rapid exploration of Unity 3D and my work on entering 'something' into this competition. Today I basically started off at square one and did the following:
- Downloaded the latest beta of 3.5.
- Watched the videos on the Unity site. These were OK, but the resolution was kinda small. I liked Infinite Ammo's videos (below) better.
- Perused the Unity docs (Unity Manual, Component Reference Manual, and Scripting Reference). You have to admit, their docs aren't too shabby.
- Watched the Infinite Ammo Unity Tutorials. (Some folks complain that these are too fast, but I found their pace great for someone in a hurry who just wants to hear about and see demonstrated lots of features.)
- Unity Tutorial 01: "Basic Object Creation and Scripting"
- Unity Tutorial 02: "Schpooter!"
- Unity Tutorial 03: "C4Ke Overview" (Nice!)
- Unity Tutorial 04: "Unity GUI Basics"
- Unity Tutorial 05: "3D Menus"
- Located some Javascript tutorials and references (here, here, and here; Google is your friend)
Now, off to the races. There are only nine days till this competition ends, so I've got to move fast!
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