The Good and the Bad (Interview)

I decided to interview my coding teacher about his life and how he started coding. This gave me some insight into how coding in Unity is used in real jobs. Also, this interview described how my teacher got into coding.

The Interview:

1. What made you want to learn how to code?

Video games.  I grew up in a small school, where most of us did not live close to each, and I was honestly not a very social kid.  So I spent a lot of my free time playing video games.  I also spent a lot of my time at my grandparent's house who had lived in Maryland, in an area best described as "The Middle of Nowhere".  My grandmother back then had a pretty powerful IBM PC, and had taught me DOS so I could operate it and run games without having to ask her for help.
Over the years, I've grew more skilled at games, and started learning different genres.  Roleplay and adevnture games contributed greatly to my ability to read, and sparked a desire to start writing my own little stories for a game.  A pretty big hurdle to cross at the age.  Around 9 years old I came across some forums for a game called ZZT.  It was a very rudimentry ASCII-Based game creation system by Tim Sweeney.(Who later founded Epic Megagames).  I was immediately enamored.
I would spend weeks at a time building these little worlds and stories for myself, and as time went on, my ambition grew and I wanted make more and more complicated settings and environments.  I started diving into the scripting language of the game, and from there had started to slowly teach myself to code.
Years passed, and the games and languages I created my own levels, scenarios, and games in changed... but ZZT will always be the game that pushed me to want to learn.

2. How do you currently use Unity in everyday work?

We use Unity in the MAP Laboratory in Pearson Lab of Temple University.  We do research work with the Oculus Rift, studying the effects of virtual environments and perception on people's balance, and can use information gathered from various devices (such as the Rift, Wii Balance Board, or Motion Analysis Systems) to help rehabilitate people.  The Oculus Rift is currently used to test people the existence of a concussions during sporting events, in a portable fashion.
The Unity engine is what allows use to display and run these 3D-Scenarios inside the Rift, as well as gather information from the Rift about the wearer's head movements, and analysis it directly.

3. What is the most complex thing that you have made on Unity?

My most complex project, barring those from my job, would have to be a mobile game I had created as a learning experience called Shield Master.  The project involved the use of a number of concepts that were rather new to myself, such as prefab instantiate, game controller systems, power-ups and timing systems, asynchronous functions, touch-screen controls, and cloud-saving, and the process of building a game for a mobile device.  I find very little individual subjects in Unity to be complex, it's more the nature of taking all these individual bits you've created, and putting them together in a working and coherent fashion.  It's a very different way of thinking.

4. What have we learned in class that you have used in your job?

The basics of scene-building are core to my job, as I am a required to develop high-quality 3D Environments for the Oculus Rift.  A lot of the graphic cheats and hacks that we use in game-design that I've taught during class are absolutely key to developing a good looking 3D scene that still runs at an optimized 60 FPS.  High frames per second and overall smoothness are key to working in VR, as any loss of frames or jitter can result in motion sickness.
Beyond that, all the transform, rotation, position, and instantiation functions that are commonly used in games are very important to my job, as well as UI.  Since programs I develop are for use with researchers who are not part of the computing field, an easy to understand UI is as important as the 3D scene itself.

5. Have you ever seen someone use Unity in your profession for something other than game design?

My entire office is filled with people learning and using Unity for 3D scene production.  It's become one of the fastest and easiest ways for someone who is not a graphics designer or programmer to still be able to develop scenes to their specs, and the Unity asset/plugins system makes it very easy for them to get up and running with 

basic set ups.  I see a lot of use for Unity in the future for research and virtual reality studies.

Post Interview:

After this interview, I mainly saw how people learn from being self-taught. It taught me the importance of being diligent, and I really hope that my work ethic will provide me with success. Anyway, stay tuned for the vlog coming later this week!