RPG Core Combat Creator: Learn Intermediate Unity C# Coding (Udemy.com)

A really fantastic course for intermediate C# programmers. If you regularly put aside some time to work through the lectures, you will come out with the foundations of a game that you can be proud of. The only slight negative I have is that Sam can sometimes jump to assumptions that the student will know exactly how something works at more advanced level than the course was intended, as well as providing challenges where the intent is not fully explained or setup for success. It really is a minor gripe though, as Sam does an excellent job overall and clearly brings a lot of experience and know-how that is required to polish this RPG game.

Well, first of all Rick. I will put this out that I love Rick. His bubbly personality makes his lectures quite fun to watch and he just makes it fun and puts a big smile across my face. So time passes by when he teaches. My favorite part would be the design spreadsheet when Rick says "here is the spreadsheet. Boom. Bye" that I think was one of the best Rick moments. Next, though Sam is a new addition he fits into Ben's shoes quite nicely. I liked his lectures not as much Rick's though. His lectures do seem a bit of a drag sometimes but at certain times he blew my mind as when I learned that Interfaces can be used to revert Dependencies and remove dependency cycles. I thought they were useless when I learned about them in my college lectures. Thank you Sam!! For blowing my mind. Also this is a bit of personal advice/bias, so do take this with a pinch of salt, but do try to spice up your lectures with probably how you screwed up in code (if you do) before recording a lecture so that we also get a chuckle and learn oh yeah that could happen toooo so that 12 mins and above lectures don't feel boring. Also thank you for using Vscode as I would have no idea how to edit scripts without Visual Studio on linux. Also I missed Ben dearly. It would nice if he showed up as a cameo. I would have thrown my hands in the air in exhilaration. Brain is an amazing Teaching Assistant. He answered all of my stupid questions as well showed me the way to things that I wanted to put in my game that were out of the scope of this course. Final Verdict. If the basic unity course was Mass Effect, then this course was Mass Effect 2. A masterpiece. (Not sure if the analogy worked though.) The basic course too was a masterpiece. But this felt more expansive. And last but not the least, Thank you!!

After 2 years, I decided to go back and do this course again, I was determined to actually finish it this time and I'm blown away with the quality of the course! Sam was an amazing instructor who was present in more technical parts of the course, Rick was mainly focused on the game design aspects of the course while also doing some coding in some parts, Rick was amazing as well! I took this course to improve my programming skills and I have to say that I'm extremely happy with what I learn and I'm really excited to start the part 2 of the course. Amazing course! I took this course on your website but I had to give you a review, fortunately I have already bought this course on Udemy as well, so I was able to share my experience

Despite some mockery that we see on Udemy advertisements with some odd duck course offerings, I dove into the coding section on Udemy and found this course and others by Ben and Rick. I think these guys are diamonds in the rough compared to others on Udemy. This course is very direct and informative and can guide someone completely new to coding from start to finish. While they do offer a beginners course, I myself was unable to finish it because my compassion was not in 2D at all. Knowing fully well I would be making it harder on myself, skipping the course half way through at Glitch Garden, I made the jump into this Core Combat class and it really was not all that bad. Not to try and say that there are not important concepts to be learned from the beginners course but that this one is doable if determined. I did have to watch many lectures a couple times to grasp concepts and understand exactly how we were refactoring and tying loose ends together in the last section but I do not hold that to Ben or Rick at all, this class is for intermediate C# and I was not fully there yet. Now however, I feel confident to say I can bend many aspects of the game to my own will and feel comfortable adding or removing things. I'd like to thank you, Ben and Rick, for putting this together, and thank you Sam for working on more features to come!

I have been working with this course for a while now and I'm finally coming up on the end of the course. There's definitely some great things to get you started and going to creating a 3D Action RPG experience. My only real issue with the course is that they have a set idea of the ARPG they want to make, and they didn't always line up with what I wanted to be able to do for my RPG. As a result some of the things I really wanted to learn about weren't particularly covered as of yet. I hear they may be included in a Part 2, but at the moment those things are unavailable through this course. Part of this issue was my desire to switch from 3D to 2D, since when I originally started this project in 3D, I felt what i wanted to accomplish would be too hard to do on my own. In 3D I'd have to model, animate and texture alot of things, and felt I could do alot more of these things in 2D in less time as I only have myself to work with at the moment. This course covers: - 3D Action RPG Like Combat - Camera Raycasting and Target Selection - 3D Combat with different weapon types - Player and Enemy Health and Energy Bars - 3D NavMesh pathfinding - Special Abilities and Attacks - Particle effects for Special Abilities - Picking up and equipping a new weapon Hoping to transfer to 2D but struggled/couldn't figure out: - 2D Action OR Turn Based Combat - How to Mouse over select with 2D since Raycasting won't work the same - How to handle weapon or attacks in 2D or even 3D without having a weapon equipped or shown - How to pathfind in 2D without a Navmesh What was missing that I *really* wanted covered in an RPG system: - Character Creation (Choose a hair style and color, body style and have a few color choices and selections from a menu) - Character Stats (How to allow a character to choose Strength, Agility, Con points and adjust them to their liking and have them affect the game in various ways) - Character Inventory - Whether it's a bag containing quest items or multiple choices of armor and weapons I wanted to be able to drag/drop or click select various weapons and armors and items to improve my character not just a walk over weapon auto equip - Character Level and Experience - While mentioned to keep track of, I don't think this was ever actually covered or implemented (To be fair I have maybe 10 lectures left but from what I can see its mostly Bug Fixing and Tweaking at this point). - Character Dialogue - While npcs may speak a line when you get close, I wanted to actually interact with dialogue choices and such - NPC Followers - Seemed inadvertantly made at one point so slightly there but wanted options for them as well Getting even more insane I'd love if we eventually learned how to do Multiplayer as well. I feel like it's a great course so far, but in some ways it feels like there's a lot more left to learn and flesh out depending on the multiple ways things can be done in an RPG. It's enough to get a demo up and running sure, but I want more of the meat and polish now.

Updated review: 9/5/19 I went through this course about a year ago and decided to go back through it starting from scratch. The revamped content is a big improvement! I liked working on the saving system in particular, and am very glad you included the section on how it was built for those of us eager to learn some programming techniques that go beyond the basics. Keep up the good work, guys. Still looking forward to part 2! Old review: ~THE GOOD~ The price… I got more than my money’s worth for this course. The instructors… Both Ben and Rick really seem to love what they do. Their enthusiasm for the project helped keep me going. The pacing… I enjoyed how the course went back and forth between writing code and working on design elements. The freebies… I loved getting new asset packs to play around with. The quantity… I learned a ton about both Unity and C# that I didn’t know before taking the course. The special ability system… At the end of the course, I have a versatile system for building special abilities, and I’ve been able to create and execute some pretty neat stuff. ~THE BAD~ Speed C#... Ben (while a good instructor) has a tendency to move quickly… too quickly for me. I had to do a fair bit of rewinding to catch what script he was working on and what code he’d just boldly deleted. Ymmv. Version control… At the start of this course, I knew nothing about version control, github, or gitkraken. I still know nada, which is a shame because I feel like a section over-viewing these things would’ve been a huge help. Section 4… I found section 4 to be frustrating. Most of the time was spent undoing and redoing work we had already done. For much of section 4 the game was in worse shape than it was in section 3 (the code structure may have been better, but as far as playing the game, we took some huge steps back). Up to this point in the course, I felt like I was making steady progress with each lecture. I realize that the goal was to show the actual development process the instructors went through, but it was painful. Some good things stripped… Completely removing the concept of critical hits instead of making them work made me sad. Removing projectiles in favor of: animation --> delay --> damage seemed like a copout. Enemy behaviour… The end result of this course is less a “core combat system” and more a “core special ability system”. The problem is, no matter how many abilities I make or how cool they are, the combat in my game is going to blow until enemy AI improves. Enemies can patrol, enemies do damage when you get in range. That’s it. A section dedicated to creating interesting enemy behaviours (not just tweaking their health, speed, and damage) is needed to have a fully functioning combat system. THE UGLY No boss… A section should have been dedicated to creating at least one good boss fight to cap off the demo. We’re told that we can add special abilities to enemies, but this is never demonstrated, and isn’t easy to figure out because of the way scriptable objects work. Part 2… Despite my criticism, I did enjoy this course and would like to continue my journey into making a finished RPG. Sadly, the updates regarding part 2 of this course are almost nonexistent. As of 6/18/18 it’s been over 9 months since Ben posted an announcement regarding the fate of this course, and seeing as he’s busy working on other projects, I fear Part 1 may be all there is. SUMMARY IF YOU ARE LOOKING TO BUY Worth the price. You will have the tools to create some cool special abilities, but understand that your finished combat system will be ultra simple until you beef up the enemy AI (which is not covered in this course). Have aspirin on hand for section 4.

I started this course after completing Learn to Code By Making Games with no knowledge of c#, only a little bit of Python. I didn't think I'd come out it with a fully functioning RPG, boy was I surprised. Ben and Rick are a pair of fun guys with a serious side and have done an exceptional job in their presentation of these videos, and with their infectious enthusiasm and knowledge, it made learning a breeze. They also supply you with a ton of downloadable free assets. Now I feel confident enough to start my own projects. Difficult? Yes! If you have no knowledge of the c# language I think you would be well advised to take Bens' other course first (Learn to Code by Making Games) which gives you sufficient grounding to attempt this one. This is only my personal opinion and I'm sure there are guys bright and inquisitive enough to take this one on without any prior knowledge but taking the other course worked for me. Not only do they teach you c# and the Unity interface, they teach you the concept of becoming a game developer and how to promote your games. The videos are very good quality and are split up to make referencing them easier. I cannot recommend this course highly enough, either on a beginner or intermediate level. A bonus is that these videos are yours for life and all upcoming new videos for the second part of this course are included (scheduled for 2018). Thank you Ben and Rick, see you in 2018.

I found this to be a very fun and informative course, covering the core combat aspects of my favorite game genre. I came to this course having a substantial amount of game coding experience (as well as general coding experience), but I am currently working towards mastery specifically with Unity and C#. Based on painful lessons which I have learned in my past experience, I felt that there was a bit too much refactoring. As the instructors have mentioned, refactors are indeed a real aspect of any form of software development, especially when it comes to large scale projects. However, some of the refactoring here could have been avoided. For example, regarding the base character: the decision could (arguably should) have been made at the beginning. When deciding upon an architecture to use, it was clear that a character should either be a base class that each type of character will inherit from, or be a universal skeleton class for an object that other component scripts would be added to in order to give them specific functionality. I chose to deviate, from the beginning, with my architecture and was quite thankful for it. When it came to the many lectures of refactoring, I was able to sit back and watch with the comfort that my project was already set up in a way that no effort to restructure was necessary. I find myself partly wondering if this was intentionally done to be an important lesson. The refactor seemed quite painful indeed, and should be a good lesson for aspiring developers to carefully think through and plan their architecture before ever even opening an IDE. If this was the intent, and if many students learned a lesson from this, then I say well played! All in all, I found this to be a great course that was very rewarding and recommend it to anyone wanting to dig into the processes of creating an RPG. I am looking forward to the follow up course! Cheers, Jason

The title explains the course's end goal: an "RPG Core Combat Creator ." This course will guide you on how to build a strong foundation for the combat part of a top-down click to move RPG, with helpings of level design, that will develop into a game concept demo. If you feel inclined, you can change the control style to something different, like controller or WSAD controls, but I found it easier to follow along by sticking to their scheme (especially with refactoring). The course description says it's for people with an intermediate skill level, so if this doesn't describe you, be prepared to do additional research on topics covered in the course, like delegates, raycasting, inheritance, co-routines, and more. The further you are from the intermediate skill requirement, the more research will be required. As of the writing of this review, the video content is 42 hours, you could easily spend a lot more time learning and wrapping your mind around some of the topics and logic they cover. Unless you're an experienced developer/programmer, you're probably going to run into times where you'll have errors that won't allow your game to compile and you'll swear that you followed the instructions to the letter, but it still won't run. Just go through the code to make sure you understand what you told it to do and that it's doing it, instead of what you think you told it to do, there's a big difference. It can be hard, but not impossible. That said, this is a terrific course, worth every second and penny spent. Ben and Rick do a great job in shifting gears between coding and design in a way that helps prevent you from getting tired of doing one thing or the other. They explain the reasoning behind what they do instead of telling you to do something some way just because. This method teaches you how to think for yourself instead of just copying code to get the end result, giving you the ability to solve problems on your own. Kind of like the teach a man to fish concept. If you have the money, buy the course (even at full price). If not, wait for a sale and pick it up then. If you really read this whole review, buy the course already.

This course is phenomenal. If you are really into game design and all of its flaws and its joys, this course is for you. You will be frustrated, but in a good way. This course shows you the actual direction that many game development cycles will go, including all of the issues and errors that come up along the way. The instructors prepare you for the thought process required to stand strong in these moments when you're genuinely contemplating slamming your mouse into your computer. They will help you through the course, but not in a way that seems as if they are standing over your shoulder. Game design is difficult, but this course will help you better prepare yourself for the real world - and you won't even realize that it is doing it. HIGHLY RECOMMEND.