Estimated Project Process

Good evening, dear readers!

What with my attempts to begin a mini-project in preparation for the meat of my dissertation, I believe I'm prepared to begin estimating the process that each project will take throughout the year. There's not much else to say, I still haven't even gotten close to being ready to make a report on the mini-project itself (hopefully have something for you later this evening), so let's just jump straight in here.

I've found that I will be largely unable to predict the content of each tutorial without watching each of them prior to the planning process. AwfulMedia's Unity C# Beginner series (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLivfKP2ufIK7SCuf1Sevu196JhgKMX42T), which I've been using to familiarise myself with Unity and help myself begin learning the syntax of C#, spends a great deal of time explaining techniques and concepts that I've been familiar with for over a year now due to my experience with ActionScript 3. However, the series also explains a number of tools which I haven't yet had the chance to use, such as enums (or enumerators), and also re-explained some things which I've used but haven't fully understood.

The bottom line there is that I have been slowly going through each episode, learning new techniques and relearning ones I already knew about, bringing progress to a crawl.

The issue, then, is that each tutorial I use in this project series might follow a similar formula of assuming that the viewer knows very little about coding, and explaining everything along the way. I may not be able to filter this out, and it may not even be in my best interest to if I don't fully understand the way the creator is going about it. So, that will slow me down, potentially quite significantly.

Now, however, for the good news:

I am continuing to learn about Unity, not having experienced it a great deal before, and I'm seeing that it offers a great range of user-interface functionality; accessing and manipulating parts of the code is even easier and more useful than I think I realised before beginning this pre-proposal-project.

For now, I believe I'm able to separate the process of each project during the presentation into two segments, each taking roughly a week to complete:

• the tutorial phase, in which I will follow the tutorial and learn the techniques I need, and
• the conversion phase, which I will use to rework the tutorial product into my own game, demonstrating understanding of the techniques.

Nothing is final yet, and this may well be improved, refined, or added to in the weeks to come, but for now I think it offers a nice, loose structure to work with.

For now, I'm going to go back to the mini-project, and will hopefully have some tangible progress to report later this evening, and if not (it is quite late), then I will definitely have something for tomorrow. Until then, have a fine... evening, I suppose, mortals.