My thoughts on the Unity user community forums have deepened since my last post. I’ve been doing a great deal of reflection upon my observations and interactions throughout the space, and I ultimately feel a strongly positive-leaning attitude toward it. What’s really started to become clear to me is just how many traits of a proper, functioning, and actually supportive affinity space that the Unity forums have. True, the forums are comparatively “quiet,” and it’s something that I will discuss in my upcoming presentation on the forums, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Upon further research into Unity’s development and release schedule, I did notice that it hadn’t immediately been released for free to the public in a necessarily easy-to-use form, which means that many of the older members in the forum aren’t just experts within the forum itself, or just skilled in the use of Unity, but prior to a certain time period, they’re actually pretty much all professionals—they couldn’t have used Unity and participated in the forums otherwise. One can understand, then, when a flood of new Unity users with no prior experience begin pouring into the forums that the old forum users may have begun using approaches such as the “non-response” to cope with the incoming tide. I’ve seen many non-response threads to those who demonstrate both a lack of experience with Unity and a lack of willingness to learn Unity in the Unity tool-specific threads where most of the experts participate.

That being said, one of the most recent threads that I commented upon (after my comment), saw a new Unity forum user make the faux pas of posting far too frequently in reply to their own posts. Whereas this sort of thing may have simply garnered a non-response in the other technical forums, perhaps in part because this was the Getting Started forum, and again, perhaps because some time now has passed since that initial wave of new and inexperienced Unity users, a “major poster” responded politely to that new forum user informing them of better ways to construct their post and reminding them, not unkindly, that over-posting in response to one’s own post was against forum guidelines. However, they followed up this message by encouraging them to continue to learn how to use Unity! The Getting Started forums really are incredibly supportive, and that’s certainly to the benefit of everyone there, including myself as I continue to learn Unity and take inspiration from the hopeful and encouraging posts of Unity experts.

I did post again in the Getting Started forums, and my post appeared above the interaction I just mentioned above. Another user had asked openly for any general advice before they started building their first 2D game, and I decided to provide a piece of advice that I borrowed from creative workshops that one should treat rough drafts they create while learning as just that—rough drafts that can be discarded, because their value was in what they helped you learn, not the rough draft itself. I posted this as I wanted to say something original, but I was still a bit frustrated by the “expected response” in the forums of practice, don’t be afraid to make mistakes, etc. However, my post was still “liked” by another forum user, and then I realized—my post basically ended up saying that they should practice and make mistakes anyway! I suppose it’s just fantastic advice in general, particularly as it ties in so closely to crucial features of game-based learning, and it’s something that I’m sure will come up in my presentation.

Overall, then, despite the frustration I mentioned of seeing some of the same advice appear frequently, it’s still good advice to practice, work hard, and not be afraid to make mistakes while learning. For all its ups and down, for now, I think the Unity forums are a great place to draw inspiration from, to get ideas of how to keep learning and improve my knowledge in Unity, and to get the occasional C# coding question answered. I’ll give a full breakdown of this entire amazing project in my presentation next week!