How I teach my cat Unity development or something like that: Prologue
This first journal entry is dedicated to my father Mohd Alipiah, my protector, confidant and interpreter of the ways of the world and who have stuck with me from the beginning. Though you are gone, I promise I’ll make something of myself from this chosen path so you can be always be proud of me wherever you are…
Hi there. My name is Suraya. And this is Mio (as in “beautiful cherry” in Japanese, “mine” in Spanish), an 8-year old red tabby Persian/Birman mix cat.
This is a daily journal that documents my journey as I begin my internship with GameDevHQ, capturing the day by day activities of me (and my cat) learning Unity game development, in the hopes of getting a Unity developer job in the game industry.
And if I ever get into an accident in the future and suffer amnesia from it, I could use this walkthrough to help me get back on the learning saddle (provided that I remember that I actually wrote one )
Being it’s my first time writing an online blog (I’m quite a private person when I go online), I’m kind of nervous despite already written tons of documentation for my last IT job with HP/DXC . Psychologist say that people like to talk about themselves as a rewarding experience and as a way to break the ice, so I might as well go with the flow. It would probably be good for me in the long run as a way to cope with the stresses of life. Who knows, once I get the hang of it, I could share some design ideas on a game I’m attempting to make, in between the Unity topics that I will be covering in the next few months.
If you just want the nitty gritty stuff on Unity, you may stop reading and wait for my next journal entry.
If you are bored and don’t mind spending a few more minutes, please continue to scroll till the end. (Oh, I love Choose Your Own Adventure games)
About Me
I’m a small town girl from the seaside town, Kuantan, in the state of Pahang, located in one of the most humid countries in the world, Malaysia (we are next door neighbors to Singapore, just so you know), with plenty of sunshine throughout the year as well as frequent heavy monsoon rain. As a result of high humidity and with average temperatures between 32–33°C, I’ve decided to do a make over for Mio to make life easier for him…
Born in the early 80s and with South East Asia heritage, I was fortunate to have two different upbringings, in the USA and in Malaysia. I don’t quite remember much of my first few years in the US since I came to the country as an infant and left at 5. But what I gained from living there, is a preference to English as my #1 language for reading and writing @ venting out and some knowledge of 80’s western pop culture stuff (suitable for kids at the time). Some of the flashbacks that I could vividly recall was dancing to Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna Fun, Tang orange juice, Jane Fonda’s aerobics workout with my mom, trick-or-treating as Tom the Cat with my younger sister as Jerry and watching He-Man and Saturday morning cartoons with my big brother in our home in Monmouth, Illinois.
I also remembered a bit of my pre-school days here, where they nurtured young children to speak up which is not a common thing in Malaysia (heard of the saying “children should be seen and not heard” ?). Therefore, I am grateful that I had that experience of being encouraged to tell stories to my parents, with my dad doing most of the listening (with his eyes closed) after a day of university lectures and coursework. Hence, storytelling has been an obsession for me while growing up and is still the driving force when I play games, aside from beautiful art work and music.
Anyway, at the age of 4 or 5, me and my siblings were fortunate that my dad brought home an Atari 2600 video console (He was a gadget junkie). Of all the games that we played, this was the one game that I adored, Activision’s Space Shuttle — A journey into space.
It was a simulation game where you get to control a space shuttle and fly on space missions, but did not have a story/narrative or even an objective. For someone who’s into storytelling, why would you love it? It’s because of the endless story possibilities when you are given the opportunity to dream without the constraints of a single narrative…
Here is how the game looks like.
And this how the game looks like from a 5-year old me (or at least how I imagined it)
While playing the game, I would create a story that I was an astronaut stranded in space and needed to find a way home before my shuttle crashes. Other times, I would encounter a friendly alien life form (ET or Firefly from My Little Pony) or a hostile enemy (Darth Vader or Skeletor). Or that if I continue to fly my shuttle non-stop, I could reach a new planet where the Care Bears lived, and fly to other galaxies like they do in Star Trek (minus the warp speed). Of course, I would crash my shuttle all the time, I wasn’t actually playing the real game as the game was really hard (it was supposedly created based on NASA’s input). Instead, I was using it as a tool/toy to kickstart my imagination.
With each gameplay iteration, more story elements and rules were added to make the experience more enjoyable, engaging, funny, scary and immersive and despite the 8-bit graphics quality, it felt real enough to me (having a young imaginative mind also helps). Little that I know, I had already designed and played my first modded game (all the modifications were inside my head).
Flash forward a few years in Malaysia. By the age of 8, I had already started programming with LOGO and BASIC and typing documents on the Wordstar word processer and fiddling around with the dot matrix printer. These were added to a lineup of existing activities, that also includes competing in drawing competitions and playing the organ in front of crowds at supermarkets (I have a tiger-like mom and an easy-going dad).
And while other kids of my age were playing platformers on the NES console or the Micro Genius (the NES Asian clones), my time was heavily invested in the adventure/role-playing games running on the Windows/IBM DOS platform (text-based and point-and-click) due to the narrative and puzzle experience they provide. The adventure games market in the early 90’s were mostly dominated by Sierra On-line and Lucas Arts games which include many great games such as Monkey Island, Kings Quest, Quest for Glory, Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle etc. They were entertaining, educational, challenging, inventive and most of all, had funny storylines and wacky characters.
Nevertheless, I wasn’t able to find one that could capture the sense of wonder and trigger an emotional impact inside me like my space shuttle ‘modded’ game. And the thought of having a career with games was the last thing on my mind when you have a tiger-mom. But that would all change in 1997.
[To Be Continued…]
Phew… that’s quite a lot of things I’ve shared in my first blog entry . My apologies for the extended length and for any spelling, structure and grammatical mistakes I’ve made as a first time blogger . So, I am going to stop here and save the rest in the next journal entries, probably as filler content. That is, if I have some extra time to spare after covering the Unity stuff which I plan to write and not being sick again. In fact, I’ve lost 21 days at the start of the challenge as a result of an illness (/_;). Having good health is very important nowadays especially during pandemic times where it’s not easy to seek medical help without running the risk of ending up as a statistic. My mom’s a Registered Nurse and we’ve had numerous COVID false alarms because her exposure at work. But still I salute her.
If you manage to reach here, please be safe and thanks for reading ^_^
