Course "Unity C# Mobile Game Development: Make 3 Games From Scratch" by GameDevTV

The course I took on game development in Godot for mobile platforms left me wanting more. So I decided to take the equivalent course for Unity and compare the two platforms. Specifically, I chose another course from GameDevTV: "Unity C# Mobile Game Development: Make 3 Games From Scratch." In this case, I bought it on Udemy, where I already have other courses.

It is based on developing three projects: a sort of Angry Birds, a racing game, and an Asteroids game. All are very simple but cover the basics: physics configuration, camera handling, and a lot, really a lot, of UI configuration.

• Regarding mobile-specific topics, the course explains:
• Editor setup to simulate mobile platforms.
• Compilation for Android and iOS.
• Input management through touchscreens, including multi-touch inputs.
• Notifications.
• Ads.
• In-app purchases.

Overall, it's good, but there are several points where it clearly needs an update. The most glaring issue is that the instructor himself acknowledges some of these points. For example, when it comes to Ads, Unity offers two options. The instructor admits that the classic option is already obsolete and that Unity's development is moving towards the second option, but guess which one he explains in the end? Exactly, the one he acknowledged as obsolete.

There are also several moments when Unity has evolved, and the components used in the class either do not appear or do not behave exactly as shown. When that happens and you get stuck, I recommend checking the comments section of the particular class. You'll see it's full of students asking questions, but the instructor never responds. Even so, it must be acknowledged that GameDevTV assigns associate instructors to answer questions, although, in most cases, their answers don't provide much help. In the end, the best tips come from other students' comments. I have also left some contributions, hoping they help someone.

As a platform, Unity is much more mature for making games and monetizing them on mobile platforms than Godot. It is evident that they have components for everything, although I did miss the greater clarity of Godot and, above all, its faster development speed. It drives me crazy every time I modify a Unity script, switch to the editor to test it, and have to spend 5 or 6 seconds staring at the screen while Unity does one of its famous "domain reloads." In comparison, the workflow in Godot is much more agile, with practically instant executions (even using C#), so it doesn't feel as tedious. In my opinion, if you want to make a mobile game intending to profit from ads or in-app purchases, Unity is the best option, although I wouldn't rule out Godot for prototyping, much less for PC games (for which I believe Godot is very well-suited).

In conclusion: the course is good and worth it. It allowed me to solidify concepts, some of which the Godot course had already introduced to me, and it finally helped me understand how to configure UIs in Unity (it's hard to believe, but I hadn't quite grasped it until now). However, be aware that some content is outdated and won't work as expected. So, if you get stuck, it's best to check the comments section because you might discover that the issue isn't your code. With that caveat in mind, I think it's a course that can be very beneficial.

Course "Master Mobile Game Development with Godot 4: From Concept to App Stores" by GameDev.TV

I'm continuing with the courses included in the latest Humble Bundle pack that I bought, which features courses from GameDev.TV. This time, I'm taking the "Master Mobile Game Development with Godot 4: From Concept to App Stores" course. You can find it on both GameDev.TV and Udemy. Buying the course on one platform or the other will depend on your preferences and which one offers a better discount at a given time. In the end, the course is exactly the same.   

It is focused on game programming for Android or iOS mobile platforms.

The course is supposed to be at an intermediate level, although the first two sections of lessons, where you build a very basic platform game without touching a mobile device, work very well as an introduction (or a refresher, if that's your case) to all the 2D aspects of Godot.

The third section dives into the more specific parts of the course and explains how to set up Godot to generate installable packages for Android and iOS. Regarding mobile gameplay, it covers how to use the device's accelerometer and how to detect and correct screen scaling issues.

I found the fourth and fifth sections quite tedious because they focus on setting up the entire UI and adding functionality to the menu buttons. It's useful if you haven't seen this topic for Godot before, but if you're already familiar with it, these two sections can feel long. Even so, I don't recommend skipping them because what follows relies heavily on the UI set up in this part.

The sixth section is the most interesting because it focuses on how to interact with the Google Play API to offer in-game purchases. It uses Godot's official plugin for this. This section is quite complex and has a couple of points that are not well explained, not due to negligence on the author's part, but because these issues seem to only occur when using Google Play for the first time. Once resolved, they don't happen again, and you forget about them. Since the author has already worked on several Google Play projects, he didn't encounter these issues, and his lesson proceeds smoothly, not realizing that first-timers might face more difficulties. For example, the explanation on how to register as a developer on Google Play seemed brief. There's also a lesson, 6.12 "Acknowledging," where there's an entire thread of comments from people who faced the same issue, without the author stepping in to help. After much searching online, I managed to solve my problem and shared my solution in the comments. The solution was to unlock developer mode, not on the mobile device (which is explained in the course), but in the Play Store app itself. I suspect the author didn't mention this because it's something you unlock at the beginning and then forget about... until you face the issue again. In an introductory course like this, it's a mistake not to mention it.

The seventh section is about publishing the application, but compared to everything else, it is very simple.

The author uses GDScript, but I was translating it to Godot C# on the fly without any issues until the in-game purchases part, which forced me to practice how to call a component in GDScript (the plugin) from C#. Nothing complex. Once you realize that it's about loading the plugin as a GodotObject and then calling its internal methods with the Call() method, everything becomes very straightforward. You just have to keep in mind that the plugin returns Godot's own types, like Array or Dictionary, which are not exactly the same as C#'s native types. In this case, I had to analyze the plugin's source code (in Java) to understand it. For the author, all these type issues were transparent due to GDScript's dynamic typing.

The author explains things well. He is Turkish, but his English is one of the clearest I've heard in a course, and if listening to English is a problem for you, there are subtitles, which are quite accurate based on the few times I've needed to use them. I also found the author's programming practices to be "healthy," resulting in a well-structured program. The principle of "downstream you call methods on references, while upstream you return signals" is something I had already suspected from my own experience, but this is the first time I've heard it explicitly mentioned, and it's a design principle I liked a lot.

Overall, despite its small flaws, the course is generally good and interesting. I recommend it.