Personal Post
100 Days of Coding Challenge
100 Days of Coding Challenge
Hey everyone, Tristan here. Thanks for checking out my blog!
Today marks the 100th day since I've begun this challenge back in February earlier this year so I thought I would take some time and reflect on what my last 100 days looked like. This post will highlight my reasons why I've begun this challenge, the 100-day plan that I set for myself, and lastly what I was able to accomplish and learn from it.
Why Even Start The Challenge?
Let's start with the question why did I even start this challenge in the first place? It was mainly due to a mixture of being bored & wanting to enhance my coding skills. About a year ago I graduated as a game programmer where I mainly specialized in mobile and desktop video game production but since graduating I've mainly stuck to creating small projects within the Unity Game Engine and have found myself becoming quite comfortable with what I was doing. Now don't get me wrong I love Unity and think it's a wonderful platform to work in but the one thing I despise more than anything is being too comfortable in one thing. Growing anxious in wanting to learn something new I've decided to take to the internet in hopes of finding some form of inspiration, luckily it didn't take long before I found a few videos on the internet of people attempting the " 100 Days of Coding" challenge and overall all had very positive feedback about the challenge. This pretty much led me to try something similar but I knew I wanted to add a bit of a twist to my version of the challenge.
The Plan
Now at the beginning of the challenge, I had no real plan in mind and to be honest I wasn't even quite sure where to begin. I thought it might be a good idea to start by refining my current coding abilities. I took to websites like Mircosoft's Dot Net Build website, where users can learn to build applications using Microsoft's online IDE and coding challenge websites like "Leet Code" and "Coderbyte". Between these websites and watching a lot, and I mean A LOT of youtube videos on coding I decided to draft a 70-day plan (by now I'm already 30 days into the challenge). The plan was to learn three completely new skills and build applications for each new thing I was learning, along with that I would also document each new thing I learned either through an online blog post (Like this one) or through a video (Click here for Channel)
Now the 3 things I've decided to go with was the following:
- XR Development
- Xamarin Development
- Crypto Development and how it all works
XR Development
Let's start with XR development, I started by attempting some XR tutorials on the Unity Learn page, overall I found most of them to be quite easy but I was still pretty unsure of how VR even worked in the first place, luckily Unity learn has a great course on the Introduction of XR (Found Here) which rightly explains how this technology can even work in the first place.
With the little to no knowledge I had in XR development, I decided to just jump the gun and jump right into my first XR project. Now I had no idea what I wanted to create in VR so I first started by playing some VR games, from the games I played I decided to make a list of things I found to be pretty cool and would later attempt to try and make a copy in Unity.
My days were pretty much structured where I would first start by playing a VR game, then record what I played in a notebook, and then take one cool feature and try to implement that thing over the next few days. This process lastly roughly about two weeks until I had a fullyfunctioning VR world, after which I decided to rap up that portion of the project and call it "VR Park".
Now one VR title wasn't going to be enough, sure VR Park was fun but I wanted something more challenging and slightly more scary. After a night of playing a recently popular game called "Phasmophobia" I decided to try and make something similar, this led me to start on my own survival game titled "Zombie VR".
Now if you want to learn more about "Zombie VR" I recommend checking out its product page found on my portflio, all I will say about the production of this game is that it really showed me how diffcult making a VR game really is. For example the way the user interacts with the world is very different if they weren't playing in VR and had me constantly theorising how to implete features such as reloading a weapon or UI to make it seem fun and interactable for the player.
Overall the XR development part of the challenge was really fun and makes me hopeful not only as a developer but as a gamer, I truly believe VR is the future of entertainment and the best is still yet to come. This part of the challenge also taught how challenging implementing features in VR can be and how developers need to think outside the box to make the VR experience an engaging one.
Xamarin Development
Xamarin update coming soon!
