How To Make The Most of Your Free Unity Learn Premium | Namu
On March 19th Unity Learn become freely available. Chances are, you heard of this, if not check out this guide on how to obtain your copy. In this guide I’ll walk you through all the essential steps you’ll need to benefit at all from this offer.
Why You Need To Be VERY Careful!
In the last year, Unity games have been downloaded more than 12 billion times. — Clive Downie, Unite 2017 Keynote
There is great competition in the game market, any game developer will tell you that this is a field that is generally associated with long crunch hours. For some reason, recently I see this pouring out into the game developer job market as well. These skills are so readily available that basically anyone can learn to make a game, which overflows the market and literally destroys industries. The only solution to this is to stop trying to use your skills to develop products that take up people’s time but rather solve real world problems and save lives — we need a lot of that nowadays.
Learning Unity alone, which is now possible for completely free, will not solve all your problems. Like all things worth having, you will need to put a lot of effort into actually landing a job that has meaning to you, this guide will show you 6 things that will be essential in your path to this goal. I will discuss how you need to change your mindset according to what the job market is actually looking for and give you the complete set of tools to ensure your success in the industry. Let’s get straight to it.
1. Specialization Is Key
This is a list of available jobs at EA, notice how specific the offerings are? Very few jobs out there look for a Game Development Generalist or Unity Generalists. Yet this is something I see on so many’s people’s resumes. Once you’ve learnt the basics of Unity Programming, move on to find something that interests you the most and specialize, specialize, specialize!
2. Set A Target Level Of Quality
In a market with such high competition, how does someone find success? By setting themselves apart!
This is a post from Freya, she is an amazing figure in the Unity Community, taking a look at her twitter account, you notice how she creates products with an amazing level of quality. Once you’ve chosen your area of expertise, it’s time you define what level of quality the products you produce should be at, it’s obvious she’s a math genius. You should look up other people in your field and look at the level of quality they have in their products, match it!
3. Focus On Practicality and Real World Application
This is by far the most important point in this article. It is no longer enough to want to make large amounts of money by working for a huge company that focuses on getting gamers hooked on their products. You need to focus on HELPING PEOPLE AND CAUSING CHANGE FOR THE GREATER GOOD. We are in an age where companies get punished by gamers for being “money centered”, EA has suffered this for long.
Gamers can see through companies that are only out for the money, employers can see through potential employees that are only out for high salaries but don’t bring any practical skills to the table.
A developer’s focus should be how he can bring value to other people, the payment will invariably follow. While learning Unity, think about how you will bring value to the people you create for, this mindset will reflect in your work.
4. Learn To Write Code Without Editor Intellisense
One of the funnier assumptions in the industry is that coding on paper is the ultimate test for a developer.
But on a serious note, the key writing code faster is understanding more of the specifics of the language, some languages like C# make a lot of sense, other like typescript, use a lot of symbols to do weird things. Many text editors make editing in these languages surprisingly easy, but the key to making the most of the tools you have is better understanding how they work. I recall spending hours writing code by hand to make the code sequence stick, try it.
5. Love Problem Solving
In the beginning of you coding journey it can be frustrating to keep on typing code and watching it fail horribly. To fix this for me, I keep one thing I made up while ago in my at all times.
Realize that as a developer all you’ll ever do you whole life is solve problems that no one else can find a proper solution for.
The only problem is when the problem is too far out of your reach to solve, then next tip will do you some good I’m sure.
6. Find People To Partner With
One of the best articles I’ve read on working with other people talks about Pair Programming and its benefits.
It has recently come to the realization of many that one of the leading causes of depression is loneliness. For some reason our job as developers usually involves working in tight schedules, on stressful work and alone for long hours.
The best peace of advice I can give is, if you find yourself feeling stressed or down while starting your developer career, find someone to collaborate with on a small project, you will learn a lot from working on something other than tutorials and collaborating with someone on things that matter to both of you should help reduce any negative feelings towards programming.
Finally
With everything considered (your goals and the search for income), the most important thing is that you do work that you love, brings value to other people and has great meaning to the world. 😊 Happy Coding.
