Unity3D - Roll a ball tutorial review

This is my first foray into game development and Unity 3D, I must admit, is a darn good gaming platform to get your hands dirty. In less than 30 minutes, I was able to get the ball rolling on my very first game board. The Roll-a-ball tutorial was very descriptive. However, there are some points that are not explicitly mentioned in the tutorial which could be helpful for a beginner to get going.

 

How to get the ball moving:

It was not evident in the tutorial that the player needs to use the arrow keys on the keyboard to get the ball rolling. Took me a couple of blogging sites to figure that out.

 

How to get the game view(or camera view) in sync with the scene view:

The tutorial starts off with showing the game view as an exact replica of the scene view. However, the Unity version 5 that I installed does not sync both the views by default leaving me wondering where the play ground is when I tried playing the game for the first time. For starters, you can do the following:

1) Select the "MainCamera" object in the "Hierarchy" tab.

2) Go to "GameObject" menu item in the tool bar.

3) Click on the option "Align to View". This will align your game view to the scene view.

How to get the  scene view in sync with the game view(or camera view):

Further down the lane, as I was playing around with the scene view, I got it all messed up. Now, I wanted the scene view the way it was. I could see that the game view and the camera view remained unchanged - the way I wanted the view to be. Here is what you need to do:

1) Select the "MainCamera" object in the "Hierarchy" tab.

2) Go to "GameObject" menu item in the tool bar.

3) Click on the option "Align View to Selected". This will align your scene view to the game(or camera) view.
 

Unable to see your changes:

For those who are used to Visual Studio IDE, you would expect that your changes are automatically saved and compiled when you hit the "Run" button. However, in the case of Unity, any changes you make in Unity have to be explicitly saved before you run. I have made the mistake of restarting my PC after making several changes. While I was expecting that my changes will be auto saved or auto recovered or at the least I would be prompted to save my changes, I had lost all my changes post reboot.

Setting up the play area - Walls do not fit the play area as per the dimensions followed in the tutorial:
This is because the play ground in the tutorial is twice the size of what we have by default on our editor. Scale the playground to twice the size along the x and z axes.

 

More to come... Will keep you posted!

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