Written by Ty 2022 Cohort
I can’t credit Youtube enough for how much it taught me. I can now develop video games using Unity, write complex code for fun, do 3D modelling, and manipulate images in Adobe Photoshop and audio at Adobe Audition. And this is only for the things related to my field. Daily living activities include cooking, exercising, playing the Kalimba, and more. Being able to use what was initially created for entertainment actually to learn real-life skills is genuinely jaw-dropping.
I am not saying it’s what everyone will find helpful. You need to know what to choose to watch and what to ignore, and this takes time. If I followed every Unity-related tutorial out there, not only that I would’ve wasted time because they were longer, but I also would’ve winded up learning nothing.
I also enjoy “how-to” video series, and I go back and re-watch them over and over. Not all skills we get from Youtube stick with us. In my opinion, this is not necessarily because of the content’s quality as much as the fact that I no longer practice what I learned. Despite being a Unity nerd, I still come back to Youtube when working on “quaternions” (a complex method of rotating objects in Unity via code) because I don’t work on it that often. I think the same applies to everything we learn in life, even at school.
However, I also got lost on YouTube, wasting hours watching content and not learning anything. As mentioned in the New York Times comment, most of the tutorials on Youtube are not filmed by people that are certified to teach. Consequently, it’s not surprising to see more than ten different ways to implement a simple 2D player movement controller in Unity ranging in difficulty and complexity depending on the instructor. Would I ever teach on YouTube? And what would I choose to teach? My answer is probably predictable at this point; as a game developer and someone who believes that programming isn’t as complex as people make it look, especially games-related programming (given that one has a passion for games,) I will go for game development tutorials. I was planning to do a long series of videos on creating a horror game in Unity, as I couldn’t find many videos on Youtube, and the ones that already exist are too simple and use old versions of Unity.