Summary
So, I finally got back into this thing. If any of you have taken a massive break from your work and then returned to it, you know that dread of looking at your code and wondering what on Earth happened. I know I do this. And I know my husband does this. But well, with Visual Script is so much worse…
You see, unlike a nice, cohesive coding document, Visual Scripting and its nodes have decided to make life difficult. There’s no real search, no going to the exact line of code you wrote when Unity screams about Bugs. And most of all, no memory.
In Visual Script, every function, every Custom Event, every variable you make… You must remember what they are on your own or suffer the consequences. In a coding environment, such as Visual Studio, you have your syntax annoying you (all those brackets!), but you also have… the predictive text! God how I miss the ability to just start typing the name of a variable or function, anything really, and have the script just prompt it to me!
The Good of Visual Script
As I come closer to the end of the Visual Scripting course by Code Monkey, I can’t help but feel that this way of coding isn’t what I want to be doing in the long run. But on the other hand, it is amazing to learn the basic concepts of the code.
You’ll be able to wrap your mind around the different elements like variables and functions, if statements, loops – whatever you like. And you can do that without the drudgery that is the syntax. I can’t tell you how frustrating it got for me as a semi-mental beginner to have to remember all the different things coders use. Mostly, the dreaded ;. Who even ends things like that?!
Anyway, other than easing into the world of code, I would suggest that you learn a language. For me, it will be C#, as that is the language of Unity.
RPG
Continuing where I left off, the next thing was to get the Game Win Scene and Main Menu working. That wasn’t too much of a challenge… until my old scripts didn’t work. Specifically the main menu. Once again, I had to face my stupidity in real time as I eventually found out that my main menu scene manager didn’t have a script attached to it. I know, I know, we are all getting a headache from all this facepalming.
The other problem, however, was not such a silly thing. You see, I can’t use the course’s resources – they are outdated and result in tons of annoyance for me (and consequently for my husband as he has to listen to me groan about the pink stuff). And here he had made a nice shader to do a tint of color when the player or the enemy gets hit and takes damage. Pretty standard thing to do for juice.
Except I had forgotten all about how to do this thing. And Mr. Monkey didn’t really explain it much, other than ‘go watch it in the extras’. Well, sir, I’ll have you know that I’m not one to jump ahead to make life easier for myself, no I am not! So I did my best to recreate it from the still image of the video. And I got it to a working state too! Just… nobody needs to know about the weird white on the back…
Bizarre errors
Now, I’m not a technical woman, so let’s all not come at me for not understanding what this diabolical thing is attempting to tell me at times. I mean, errors like “Deserialization Object reference at index #0 does not match the target type. Defaulting to Null” I can sort of get. Lists, indexes, ok don’t got it, you make null. That’s bad only if it starts affecting me at some point, so I’ll just bypass you for now, ok? Ok.
But then comes this one: “Error Objects are trying to be loaded during domain backup. This is not allowed as it will lead to undefined behavior!” Come again? Which objects exactly? What domain backup?
This thing has a second cousin from its mother’s side too, telling me something is popping more than it can push and I’d be lying to you if I didn’t just snicker at that. The actual error is ‘’GUI Error: You are pushing more GUIClips than you are popping. Make sure they are balanced.’’ I think. Now this is a bit scary since I read from somewhere that it can kill the GPU. But then again, I’m not smart enough to find what is wrong and where, and it would even be a hassle for my genius husband. Let’s hope it doesn’t kill one of our workhorses, shall we?
What’s next?
As I mentioned in my News post, The RPG section of this course is almost over. After that, there’s pretty much just one more step before completion – the FPS. So, after the polish and juicing of the RPG, I will move on to that, and then there is only some 20 minutes of extra material to glance at.
After the Visual Scripting course, I will take a small break from coding and study some Game Design, Cutscenes, Game Psychology, and Level Design. And then, it is time to start making my first authentic project with the help of some other materials we have! Meaning that I will most likely pick a genre, and try to build my own game based on the tutorial/course. I’m just a babydev, after all!