Remaining To-Do For My Next Unity 3D Adventure
I enjoyed my Unity 3D adventure this time around, starting from the LEGO microgame tutorials through to the Essentials pathway and finally venturing out and learning pieces at my own pace in my own order. My result for this Unity 3D session was Bouncy Bouncy Lights and while I acknowledge it is a beginner effort, it was more than I had accomplished on any of my past adventures in Unity 3D. Unfortunately, once again I find myself at a pause point, without a specific motivation to do more with Unity. But there are a few items still on the list of things that might be interesting to explore for the future.
The biggest gap I see in my Unity skill is creating my own unique assets. Unity supports 2D and 3D creations, but I don't have art skills in either field. I've dabbled in Inkscape enough that I might be able to build some rudimentary things if I need to, and for 3D meshes I could import STL so I could apply my 3D printing design CAD skills. But the real answer is Blender or similar 3D geometry creation software, and that's an entirely different learning curve to climb.
Combing through Unity documentation, I learned of a "world building" tool called ProBuilder. I'm not entirely sure exactly where it fits in the greater scheme of things, but I can see it has tools to manipulate meshes and even create them from scratch. It doesn't claim to be a good tool for doing so, but supposedly it's a good tool for whipping up quick mockups and placeholders. Most of the information about ProBuilder is focused on UV mapping, but I didn't know it at the start. All ProBuilder documentation assume I already knew what UV meant, and all I could tell is that UV didn't mean ultraviolet in this context. Fortunately searching for UV in context of 3D graphics gives me this Wikipedia article on UV mapping. There is a dearth of written documentation for ProBuilder, what little I found all point to a YouTube playlist. Maybe I'll find the time to sit through them later.
I skimmed through the Unity Essentials sections on audio because Bouncy Bouncy Lights was to be silent, so audio is still on the to-do list. And like 2D/3D asset creation, I'm neither a musician nor a sound engineer. But if I ever come across motivation to climb this learning curve I know where to go to pick up where I left off. I know I have a lot to learn since meager audio experimentation already produced one lesson: AudioSource.Play would stop any prior occurrences of the sound. If I want the same sound to overlap each other I have to use AudioSource.PlayOneShot.
Incorporating video is an interesting way to make Unity scenes more dynamic, without adding complexity to the scene or overloading the physics or animation engine. There's a Unity Learn tutorial about this topic, but I found that video assets are not incorporated in WebGL builds. The documentation said video files must be hosted independently for playback by WebGL, which adds to the hosting complications if I want to go down that route.
WebGL
The Video Clip Importer is not used for WebGL game builds. You must use the Video Player component’s URL option.
And finally, I should set aside time to learn about shaders. Unity's default shader is effective, but it has become quite recognizable and there are jokes about the "Unity Look" of games that never modified default shader properties. I personally have no problem with this, as long as the gameplay is good. (I highly recommend Overcooked game series, built in Unity and have the look.) But I am curious about how to make a game look distinctive, and shaders are the best tool to do so. I found a short Unity Learn tutorial but it doesn't cover very much before dumping readers into the Writing Shaders section of the manual. I was also dismayed to learn that we don't have IntelliSense or similar helpfulness in Visual Studio when writing shader files. This is going to be a course of study all on its own, and again I await good motivation for me to go climb that learning curve.
I enjoyed this session of Unity 3D adventure, and I really loved that I got far enough this time to build my own thing. I've summarized this adventure in my talk to ART.HAPPENS, hoping that others might find my experience informative in video form in addition to written form on this blog. I've only barely scratched the surface of Unity. There's a lot more to learn, but that'll be left to future Unity adventures because I'm returning to rover work.