Hello everyone. I am new to this forum, and I was hoping to get some advice from all of the wonderful members here.
I have been trying to break in to the industry for a while now, and I wanted to know what are the most important skills I should work on for my resume and portfolio. Most of my experience is in 2D content creation i.e. Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash. I was working on an animation reel for my portfolio, but with Flash falling out of favor I’m wondering if that is the best move. Should I focus my efforts on learning a newer animation suite or a different game engine?
Since I know some JavaScript, I’ve been looking into Unity. Is this a good choice for someone like myself coming from a Flash/ ActionScript 3 background?
I love to read anyone’s thoughts on this. Also please check out my website at www.karlaegley.com and let me know if there is anything that I need to improve. Thank you all so much!
Unity3D would be a good way to migrate into 3D from Flash. From personal experience, I have found that AS3.0 and Unity’s JavaScript/UnityScript language are very similar so it wouldn’t take too much for you to get comfortable with it. If I recall correctly, and someone feel free to correct me if I am wrong, typical JavaScript and Unity’s JavaScript are not the same, which is why people usually call it UnityScript instead.
But Flash isn’t completely obsolete, most of the gaming (casino) companies use it for their games. There’s even a TA position open currently for someone that’s more Flash oriented: Williams Interactive
So it also comes down to what you would like to do. If you’re more comfortable with 2D, there are still opportunities available, but there is also no harm in expanding your skill set as well, probably even more beneficial to say you’re at least familiar with other things in the event that a company is using Unity3D to do a 2D game.
It can be difficult to become a better scripter/coder/developer through Unity. You can get a lot of work done in Unity with bad code and, as Ajia mentioned, JavaScript in Unity really isn’t reflective of the true nature of JavaScript. It’s more like “Javascript pretending to be C#” (or something like that). This false confidence with said language will bite you in your butt when it comes to proving your competency to employers - You’ll be missing the fleshy good stuff involved with working with C# or JavaScript that rarely shows itself when scripting in Unity.
If you’re interested in expanding your “2D technical art” skills, work with something like Node.JS and JavaScript. This will give you a framework to expand your JavaScript/Web knowledge while building practical, experience-building tools and scripts. Not to mention, JavaScript is the primary scripting language of choice for most Adobe products and has an extremely close relationship with ActionScript (as they’re both based on ECMAScript) so you’ll open a lot of avenues within the web/mobile game space.
If you want to work on 3D more, (and who doesn’t?) Python and Maya is definitely the route to go right now. Learn Unity as an application, not a scripting platform.
And if you can’t make up your mind, just learn Python. It never hurts to know more Python.
Thank you both Ajia and Roxol. You both provided very good advice. I was not aware the JavaScript used in Unity was different. It sounds like it’s a little more forgiving, but that doesn’t exactly help me learn it the right way.
It seems Unity is also primarily designed for 3D games anyway. My personal 3D skills are crude at best. I actually own a copy of 3Ds Max 2009 and Mudbox 2009 from my school days, but I never used it much. (The illustrator in me prefers to think in 2D.) I would love to learn more about it though. Any recommendations for someone to begin learning necessary 3D skills from home?
By the way, thank you Ajia for the job link. I’m on LinkedIn, and I can’t believe it didn’t recommend that job to me because it sounds like a good fit. While I think about the Unity/JavaScript/3D question, I am definitely going to revamp my efforts to finish my animation reel so I can apply. People can say what they want about the future of Flash, but it’s still a great animation tool.