Framework Pau!

Day 26 on my Journey of becoming a Gaming Software Engineer:

Yes.. Finally! I passed the Framework section of my coursework today. I almost thought I would never catch on to Unity and C#, but I doubted the power of my mind much too quick. When you combine your vision of who you want to become with reality, and add some determination to get you through it all, BIG ‘magic’ can happen! I’m so glad I can decipher the language of the machines. I’m actually getting it! I know there’s so much more for me to learn but I’m happy that I’m finally making real progress. The last 26 days has been a journey! I can now move forward to the next phase of my coursework. I am excited!

One thing I’d like to share, is by journaling everyday and reflecting on what was done, it actually helps me to zoom out of the brain-boggling lines and lines of code I look at everyday and be objective to where I’m really at and what I’m learning. It really helps me to see where I came from. So before I move on, I’ll share what I completed today.

I created a “Camera Shake” function. It’s a cool visual function that shakes the camera anytime my Player takes damage. It took a while for me to figure out how I was going to actually write it out in pseudocode and implement it. Everyone in my team did it differently. Or hasn’t got to that part of the coursework yet. I started by adding a new script to my Game Manager. I made a reference to my Camera game object and I created a few variables ranging from the amount of camera shake I wanted to create, to how long the camera shake would last, once activated. In coding, nothing exists. You have to define everything! Everyday, I learn more and more about this simple principle, by getting lost somewhere in my code from forgetting to define something. But the more I do it, the more I get familiar with everything, and I begin to see what I’m missing or what I can take out. It’s truly amazing!

After I was done with figuring out the logic and writing out my pseudocode and code, I debugged my script to check what wasn’t being called, and when everything worked, I added the script to my main camera game object. I had to do a few tweaks to get it to where I wanted the speed and variation of camera shake to look dramatic, but all-in-all, everything function as it should. Whew!

I am looking forward to jumping into the next and final phase of my training.. Core Programming, here I come!

Till my next post.. Take Care and Aloha Forward,

Sam