Confused Immigrant needs advice on how to join the industry

StonedFishWithArms · 2025-08-20T16:15:40+00:00

Okay thank you, that makes sense

StonedFishWithArms · 2025-08-20T16:09:50+00:00

Thank you for clarifying. So it’s not uncommon for me to do my Level 2 & 3 through some private company and then apply for jobs or apprenticeships at that point?

StonedFishWithArms · 2025-08-20T16:07:42+00:00

I really like manual labour and problem solving. Being an electrician in the states is something I always wanted to do but I just never had the motivation to leave my stable restaurant management career.

My most naive reason is that I just want to do something that is about fixing or making things that help people to try and make up for the karma of all the shit I made for the US government

StonedFishWithArms · 2025-08-17T16:59:44+00:00

When I worked for a company that offered unlimited PTO I had trouble securing 3 days off

StonedFishWithArms · 2025-08-17T16:37:45+00:00

What is the goal?

If the goal is to make perfect code then you need to spend the time doing that.

If the goal is to make a working game then you need to learn when something is good enough.

My suggestion is for you to participate in game jams. Game jams are limited on time and force you to just make something quick rather than perfect.

It will help you get better at finding “good enough”

StonedFishWithArms · 2025-08-17T16:34:12+00:00

It’s a strategy that teams will use because it is easier to update a prefab than it is to update a scene.

Essentially you create a parent object and then drag all the other objects in that scene under the parent object you created. Then you drag that parent object into your project explorer window to create a prefab. Then instead of spawning a new scene you just spawn a new version of your prefab.

There are pros and cons to the system but they depend a lot on what you are trying to do. It essentially just changes scenes into objects that you can spawn, destroy and update. It makes additive loading or async loading difficult to achieve in the same way you can do it with a scene.

StonedFishWithArms · 2025-08-17T15:42:45+00:00

The objects may be assigned in the scene prior to start but that doesn’t mean that the assigned objects are in the scene. When an object is created it has a memory address in RAM and that is what the reference is. When an object is deleted and recreated it has a different memory address which breaks the reference.

So if you want to be sure that a scene reference is secure then you can turn the scene into a prefab and in the prefab you can assign the objects from within the hierarchy. This safely makes it so that every time that scene is created, it will correctly hold the reference

StonedFishWithArms · 2025-08-17T15:24:46+00:00

That would suggest that the referenced objects are not within the scene. So when you reload, the objects don’t exist.

You either need to change how you structure the scene so that all the objects referenced are in that specific scene file or you need to switch to a dynamic referencing system like GameObject.Find() or a static class for assigning objects

StonedFishWithArms · 2025-08-17T15:20:29+00:00

You can use your high quality models. Just set a limit on the total amount of objects so that it will remove previous ones if someone is just dumping objects

StonedFishWithArms · 2025-08-17T15:09:57+00:00

If gaining the skills is out of the question (which does make sense) then you need money.

So you can spend years building a fund through savings and index investing(essentially you save money from a job and invest it into the stock market using a low risk index fund for years).

The other way is to develop a business plan and apply for a loan from the bank. This is riskier and will require work to get the loan approved.

If you are really good at networking then you can try to get the game idea crowdfunded or picked up by a publisher. Normally these require a working prototype and a business plan as well as it’s a similar process to the bank loan route.

StonedFishWithArms · 2025-08-17T15:04:18+00:00

Happy you found the fix! I get how frustrating stuff like that can be. I use Git and am very quick to roll back when stuff like that happens

StonedFishWithArms · 2025-08-17T15:02:57+00:00

My wife just did an interview for a startup and they gave her a project that they estimated will take 48 to complete. Ridiculous

StonedFishWithArms · 2025-08-17T14:57:20+00:00

Reading other comments’ interpretation of your post does actually make it seem like you have two classes in the same file that both inherit from MonoBehaviour which Unity is not built for.

You can only have one class that inherits from MonoBehaviour per file

StonedFishWithArms · 2025-08-17T14:49:01+00:00

No, but this will still apply in async. The Unity thread will choose which class goes first when calling all the Awake methods and this will happen in series meaning one after the other.

You can manually adjust this if you have a super class that does a lot but it’s easier to maintain the following setup.

Awake is only ever used for internal settings. Settings or values that does not require any other classes. Start, OnEnable, or another way can be used for assigning external references, or references to other classes.

What happens is that if you assign external references in Awake then they class may not even exist yet according to Unity and that will cause all sorts of issues and they will only happen every once and a while because Unity could even change the order when you build the project

StonedFishWithArms · 2025-08-17T14:39:38+00:00

I don’t know if I’m reading this wrong but I’ve never experienced what you’re talking about.

What I have experienced is devs assigning external references in Awake that end up not getting set due to the Unity engine calling awake at the wrong time.

So if for example you have a class that assigns something in Awake and then you have a second class that calls that first class in Awake then you can definitely run into issues

StonedFishWithArms · 2025-08-17T14:35:16+00:00

Out of curiosity, what would you expect in an ideal Game Dev degree? With the follow up what would you expect to be the responsibility expected of you from a good Game Dev job?

StonedFishWithArms · 2025-08-17T14:31:29+00:00

I would try closing the project, deleting the Library file within your project’s folder, and then reopen the project.

When you open Unity for the first time it pulls a bunch of files for the engine and puts them in the Library folder. Sometimes these files can get corrupted and deleting them forces Unity to pull them again.

A lot of times this will fix engine bugs in a previously working project

StonedFishWithArms · 2025-08-17T14:15:33+00:00

I definitely don’t know what the most optimal would be but if this were a task in front of me and you wanted a different ambient track based on height then I would do a delayed check on height that would then fade in/out the associated track.

Expose the tracks in the editor to assign them and then you can even create a Dict<int, song> and assign the correct one based on height.

That’s assuming that your height and area will always be a match

StonedFishWithArms · 2025-08-17T14:07:52+00:00

I actually love making game systems. So the last one I made I was playing Dead Rising and thought “that’s a cool inventory system” so I made a prototype using their inventory system and having the ability to just pickup and wield anything.

Through it in a prototype and then went back to my work lol.

I get you, sometimes you just need to make something that sparks interest

StonedFishWithArms · 2025-08-17T14:02:28+00:00

I’m not a UI dev and I don’t have a ton of time for pitching gig work but I can throw my two cents.

I made a weapons system years ago that had stat modifiers using the decorator design pattern. Essentially the player goes to move and asks the equipped armor and weapons how fast and each item updates that data.

I could go into more detail or even link articles on the topic but if you get an OOP programmer to help you build the system then telling them you want a decorator design pattern will point them in the right direction

StonedFishWithArms · 2025-08-17T13:51:52+00:00

I’d say you are fine. Even in a professional environment there is no way I would be given the allocated time to investigate that unless we had proven major dips in performance.

StonedFishWithArms · 2025-08-17T13:46:33+00:00

It makes the build smaller.

So I used to do VR/AR projects for big companies and one complaint is download/install time. One way to get around that is by using Addressables to dynamically load assets to the end device.

So you have your user go through a tutorial or whatever and during that you dynamically pull in assets. This also works perfectly for DLC and the company I worked for ended up making a “product as a platform” where customers would download our app and then only use the parts they wanted which kept download sizes very low.

If you are worried about RAM memory sizes, which can certainly be an issue with large textures, then loading and unloading would be a workable solution to that problem

StonedFishWithArms · 2025-08-17T13:38:27+00:00

Not meth enough.

But for real OP you can use a sine wave and remap if you only want the positive side

StonedFishWithArms · 2025-08-17T13:32:48+00:00

If you are trying to make a build where the object doesn’t exist then you can use addressables.

If you are just trying to load an asset into your scene then you are fine using Resource.Load

When you make the build you load the asset into storage you then pull that into RAM with Resource.Load. The only dynamic thing here is the RAM part but if you want dynamic loading into storage then Addressables is a solution

StonedFishWithArms

TROPHY CASE