Training, First Fortnight Snippets

A few quick impressions/thoughts/observations from the first two weeks of being a trainee teacher. (I’ll try to be more organised and more coherent in future, particularly if anyone tells me they’re interested in reading it.)

Applying for Teacher Training I

In a previous post I told you about my plan to become a teacher, and said I might give a few comments about the process so far. Here goes nothing.

A New Plan

I’ve been planning to say something for a while now about some life changes that I’ve been slowly working toward. As the list of things likely to go wrong shrinks, and the other things I’d like to say increasingly need references to stuff I haven’t shared yet, it’s about time for an announcement.

An English-Speaker Abroad

I’m back from Lisbon [edit: that was actually in November, but for some reason I wrote this at the time and left it in drafts]. When I got back from Italy (Naples, Rome, Florence and briefly Venice) I wrote a big post with a degree of care to be on-topic for the design aspect of Continue Reading

Tutorial, or not Tutorial

Inspired by the discussion I got into this morning on Twitter, where there simply aren’t enough characters, my strong feelings on tutorial design.

The Wrong Null!

tl;dr: You can check whether a Unity.Object (including Component, GameObject, MonoBehaviour, etc.) is null using if (variableName), because it has an implicit bool operator that checks != null. If you’re trying to expose generic-typed properties in the inspector, you should constrain them with where T : Component or similar, or strange things may happen when Continue Reading

UX Observations from Holiday

It’s amazing how much you can learn about user experience by getting out, going to places and doing things. Unless you’ve actually tried it, in which case it’s pretty obvious that experiencing things is going to teach you about experiences.

Unity Object Pooling

Object pooling is pretty simple, and I was put off a lot of existing guides and examples by what seemed like unnecessary complexity. Since then my own solution has probably got at least as complicated, but I’ll explain as I go; your mileage my vary.

Unity Troubleshooting II

Some more Unity 3D tips that I need to write down while I remember them. (You might be interested in the previous ones.) TL;DR: Don’t forget to use Time.deltaTime for per-second change. Content Size Fitters update late, so read their properties at end of frame.