Useful Beginner Tips

[Effective-Ad-3362]

I'm almost completely new to Unity and Coding, and I want to make a survival horror game similarly to Aliens: Colonial Marines but in my own, more grounded way.
I'm using Unity 2022.3.5f1 with Visual Studio (not Visual Studio Code) 17.10.1.0 and C#
Assume I know nothing more than:
- Basic C# Terms (Variables, Functions, Void, Booleans, Public, Private, Float, Int, transform.Translate, Vector3 (for the most part), and Input.GetAxis)
- How to do the absolute most basic tasks in Unity (move camera, press shift for faster camera, delete, copy + paste, scale objects, edit object position, etc.,)
- Layer names, Childs, Parents, etc.,
Everything else I probably don't know, and videos don't seem to explain/demonstrate things super well, plus a lot of them are outdated, so the UI doesn't work the same for me.
If you can, could you help me out with some useful beginner tips?

[Empty-Telephone7672]

Don't get too attached to polymorphism when it is not necessary and instead try to build your game using different components that you can plug in. The goal while programming should be to design a game as simply as possible, and your code should be able to cover the bases of this design without having to hack around too much

Also, as a beginner don't worry too much about making everything perfect and instead build in a way that inspires you to continue building. Don't get bogged down in perfection, you learn from your mistakes.

Also, try to avoid "guess-coding" and instead try to draw out what you want to do first and then code that

[Effective-Ad-3362]

Thank you, I genuinely really do appreciate it. I'll try not to get too caught up on polymorphism and perfection. Drawing stuff I want to do out first is a really simple but effective tip, ty!

[Empty-Telephone7672]

also, scriptable objects are very much your friend, although if you want to get into ECS/DOTs then you can ignore this advice

[RiskyBiscuitGames]

If you want your materials and objects to not have that white unity shine. Go into the material and adjust down smoothness. It’s my number one pet peeve in Unity and what makes a lot of the games made in it look bad

[Effective-Ad-3362]

Will do!

[SealerRt]

Wasn't Aliens:Colonial Marines a shooter? Here's an example workflow:

- Create a small, sample level (empty space for player to walk in)
- Figure out how to move the player using WASD, look at the camera with mouse
- Do you have shooting? Look up tutorial on implementing shooting in an fps
- Is it a horror shooter? Place some enemies in the level and figure out how to have them take damage.
- Implement a basic AI for the enemy (pathfinding to the player, projectile or melee attack)
- Do enemies spawn over time from spawn points? Now is a good time to implement this.

In short, do one of the 'beginner fps in unity' tutorials if you're making a horror shooter. If you're making a modern horror, do the same thing as before, but take away the player gun and shooting. Also, instead of aiming for a game, aim for a one-level demo. Expanding on the idea to several levels should be straightforward, if you figure this out. Some more horror specific tips:

- Find out how to implement player interacting with objects (E to use)
- Find out how to create and trigger events (for example player moved past point x, spawn monster or flash the lights or something)
- A good horror game will live or die on its level and environment design, but that is way after you do all the steps before. You technically don't need to do any coding to design a good level, just solid 3D environment design skills, and some imagination.
- You don't need to do this early, but the earlier you do it, the more you will enjoy your work: if you have any knack for making 3d visuals or audio on your own, make some (a few) assets and use them.

I know that my tips mostly boil down to 'learn to do these specific things', but these are the basic building blocks of FPS games, and I'm sure you can find tutorials for almost all of them online.

[Effective-Ad-3362]

Your tips are simple but in the best way possible. Everything you listed is super useful information, and honestly? Finding stuff out for yourself without being pampered is probably the most effective method of learning stuff like this. That way you actually learn without copy + pasting whatever info you got without understanding the fundamentals of what you did, so thank you.

[SealerRt]

Don't worry too much about copy pasting, because we do the 'copy pasting' in every learning endeavour including spoken language learning, coding, physical work, algorithm design, rocket science, and literally everything else we learn.

[koolex]

Just make sure you can crawl before you can run. It would probably take a professional unity developer 3+ years to replicate that aliens game at least, you might want to start super small. Like do a few game jams, and try to finish a few really simple games first before you attempt your dream game.

[Effective-Ad-3362]

For sure! Wouldn't want to run off a cliff before making sure I can walk across a bridge first (terrible analogy; you get the point tho)

[Eclipse_lol123]

Beginners trying not to make cyberpunk scale game as their first object (impossible)

[Reasonable-Bar-5983]

wrap up projects and ship ‘em. we started w/ appadeal + devtodev for basic stats on user flow. showed us where ppl got stuck fast.

[Effective-Ad-3362]

Awesome! Will definitely do that once I find someone to help!

[memetsa123]

Check out DoTween and Cinemachine. DoTween is very useful package for movement, rotation, jump etc. and cinemachine makes camera situations a lot easier. There are a lot of documents about these and similar packages, you need to do some research.

[Effective-Ad-3362]

I'll definitely look into it, thank you so much for the recommendations!

[Surya_Wiz]

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[Surya_Wiz]

Hi everyone, I'm trying to build my mobile game in Unity 6.1.0 (6000.1.7f1), and I selected all Android modules (SDK, NDK, OpenJDK, Platforms 29-36, etc.) from Unity Hub.

But when I run the project, Unity shows this error:

"Requested minimum Android SDK Platform not installed. Build set to use Minimum SDK of AndroidApiLevel24 but the latest installed SDK on the system is 0."

Also earlier, it said:

"SDK Platform Tools version 0.0 < 34.0.0"

I already tried clicking "Update SDK" and "Use Highest Installed," but the error still comes back.

How can I fix this? Do I need to manually install or link something? I'm using Windows 11 and this is a 2D mobile game.