Our first introduction to Unity was mentored by Owen Harris (@theAllThing) of bitSmith Games on Monday 25th November.

Thanks to Science Gallery for hosting our workshop.

After a slight delay in starting the workshop, and making sure everyone had the latest version of Unity installed on their laptop, we got stuck into it by loading an sample Unity project, and learnt the basic move, panning, rotating, scale as well as how easy it can be to get lost in the 3D virtual world when placing objects on the plane.

Owen proceeded to get everyone to have some fun by creating a new scene, add a terrain, painting the terrain, make mountains/valleys, add textures, create palettes. We did have some disappointed voices when Owen moved on to other features when they were having fun designing their level, but was rest assured there was plenty of time for level design near the end of the workshop.

By the end of the workshop, we were able to understand the environment a little, make our terrain with mountains, valleys, trees, water and adding a sky. So a wee bit of physics, importance of tagging, importing and running scripts, as well as importing assets from the Unity Assets Store. This led us being able to pick up objects like a sphere and chuck it at a rigid structure. And finally build and run our own game.

Sample outputs from the workshop

• Sample 1 (This is my one, I know it's not pretty as the ones below, it's more getting it to function from my perspective. ;-))
• Sample 2
• Sample 3
• Sample 4
• Sample 5

Here are some of Owen's recommendations

• http://3dbuzz.com/training/topic/unity
  More for making environments; unity fundamentals.
  There is a practical game development paid courses (but worth it)
  These are mainly video tutorials
• burgzergarcade.com
  It is code heavy; advance coding side of unity; handles a lot of data giant game
• youtube - "cooking with unity" (C#)
  Begins with space invaders,  infinite runner, and lots more.
• unity3d.com/learn (language agnostic) professional training
  It has a more succinct tutorial section where they have 5 minute video on what was covered in the workshop, e.g. physics, rigid body
• walkerboystudio.com (JavaScript)
  Tutorials like Mario games
• colorschemedesigner.com
  Get a colour scheme; great for how games look.

Game events that are coming up

• State of Play (Fri 29th Nov @ DIT)
• Dublin GameCraft 4 (Sat 7th Dec @ NDRC)
• dubLUDO

Storified some of the tweets as well. :-)

Thanks again to all who came along, and apologies for the last minute change of times.

A big thank you to Owen who made some awesome banana bread for all.

An finally that yummy nomnom banana bread recipe: http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/711459#5685398