As some of you may know, I’ve been spending time learning Unity and C#. You see, I found myself to be an old dog, with nothing but a bag of old tricks. Those old tricks, it seems, no longer impressed anyone. I could have chosen many things, but this was what I chose.
But that’s not what this story is about…
I ended up settling on, what is now, and older version of the GameDevHQ program. I was making pretty good progress, when suddenly I hit a snag. I hit the “Final Project” for the first part of the program, and they stopped giving me assets. Now, because I had stalled out a couple times already, I thought, maybe I missed a memo. So, I scoured around looking for the missing assets. Eventually, I discovered the needed assets were deliberately not provided. It was up to me to come up with something.
But that’s not what this story is about…
In the process of searching, I found a bunch of blog sites created by other students of the same, or newer program. It became quickly obvious as part of the later versions of this program, the students were encouraged to blog about their journey through the GameDevHQ program.
This was genius I thought. Genius like monkey even! First and foremost, the student gets the benefit of going back through the lesson and explaining it in their own words. Education has been making students do this for centuries (or at least since I started school). Secondly, the student gets the benefit of having their own reference manual to remind themselves how to do the things they learned. Oh yea, and GameDevHQ gets lots of free marketing! Genius…
The blogs I saw presented themselves very well. They had images and text, screenshots and code as well as animated GIFs showing the action. I really liked the animated GIFs. I liked them better than embedded videos because you didn’t have to hit play.
Of course, I didn’t know how to do these animated GIFs, but that’s not what this story is about…
It was the idea of blogging my adventure that lodged in my head. But I was nearly done with this first part of the program. How could I do it? All that original code was gone, replaced by the steps that followed. Or was it?
Queue Delorean…
Well, queue Git actually. Fairly early (but not at the beginning) I decided to start using Git to version and save my code. It also allowed me to easily switch between workstations when I needed and of course, kept my code nice and safe when I decided to upgrade, overhaul and reimage my laptop. But this is also not what this story is about…
What this story IS about, is to warn you all that I am about to do some Time Travelling, with the help of Git, and spend some time walking through my GameDevHQ journey. It will be good for me to review my code and catch myself back up to where I was as I re-engage and move forward.
Hopefully, I’ll not make any inadvertent changes to the future while I’m gone. If you feel yourself fading, please leave me a note somewhere you know I’ll find it…
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