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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

I've recently started exploring the world of Unity and the weirdest thing about it is that it's 90%/10% in favour of video tutorials - even for the purely code-based aspects.

Even Unity's own official tutorials are all in video form.

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I'm seeing this more and more for other things, programming and non-programming, like "How to do XYZ with a Raspberry Pi". I'll generally try to skip the videos because they are almost always awful in terms of time efficiency. Instead of what should be a single page of text with 8 written steps, we now have all these 5 minute videos that start with a 20 second spinning logo intro, then a blank desktop and someone saying "Hey guys, today I'm going to..." It's halfway into the video by the time he's even gotten the subject matter on the screen. Then at the end there's a 30 second outtro with "Hey, guys, if you liked this tutorial, go ahead and like, subscribe and comment below! And check out my Youtube channel and like and subscribe! And if you didn't like this tutorial, go ahead and like and subscribe anyway! Catch my other great videos on my channel and of course like and subscribe!!"

I remember buying books to learn a piece of software (whether COTS or a development library) and inevitably things would go off the rails and not work for some reason. Since then I have learned to be skeptical of written tutorials and prefer the video approach whenever possible. With video I can see the exact steps and don't have to worry as much that I'll get stuck. So I consider efficiency a little differently. I don't mind scrubbing a video if I have to. In the end, I get more value from sources that demonstrably work and reliably teach rather than wasting time on an n step tutorial only to find that step m doesn't work the way the author claims and having to thrash around for the real solution.

I have noticed that with UE4 and houdini as well. I assume to some extent it makes sense if you are actually navigating a GUI as complex as that. Still drives me crazy though.

That's just the nature of gamedev. It's a mix of code + tools to leverage the team composition of a development studio.

Usually the composition is something like 10:70 in terms of dev:art/design/audio/etc, videos are a much easier way to communicate information in that domain.

> That's just the nature of gamedev. It's a mix of code + tools to leverage the team composition of a development studio.

Implicit in that statement is the assumption that video+audio is optimal for teaching complex GUIs. I dispute that.

It's likely the highest ROI way to package it, relative to active effort, i.e. excluding time waiting for video encoding. You record a few minutes, narrate over it, and post it.

This is where I've found Lynda's tutorials great. They align the text to the video so you can see and read at the same time. I was able to get pretty far by reading Unity In Action though, which was purely just a book tutorial and I really enjoyed it. So I don't know, I would attribute it more to a younger audience who is more receptive of videos over written tutorials.

> I would attribute it more to a younger audience who is more receptive of videos over written tutorials.

Is this really true? There's some inherent advantages to words and pictures vs video and audio that can't be hand-waved away as 'preferences' or 'learning styles'. Has an entire demographic really chosen a medium that nullifies such powerful techniques as skimming, copy/paste, seeking without laborious workarounds, variable speed of consumption etc.

Depends on the tool - e.g. LibGDX, MonoGame, Cocos2D-x - are more programmer-friendly, i.e. code-oriented approach. Unity, Atomic, Godot - these are designer's tools.

I guess it's because Unity is more designer's tool rather than programmer's - 90% of the time you just click and drag mouse around the UI.

See my answer below. Video and audio is still sub optimal even for GUI tutorials. It's the fact the Unity also involves significant amounts of coding that pushes this from "sub optimal" to "gob-smackingly awful".

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