Industry veterans Rick Davidson & Tim Ruswick are joined by Antonia Forster from Unity, to discuss Antonia’s game dev journey from our Complete C# Unity Game Developer 3D Online Course to being the Senior XR Technical Specialist at Unity.

Antonia’s success story is something we can all use as inspiration. Antonia had no coding knowledge when starting the Unity 3D course and came from a zoology and animal biology background, now she works at Unity!.

In this devology livecast, Rick Davidson & Tim Ruswick* talk to Antonia about her journey in game dev and how she ended up where she is today.

(*Rick has more than 14 years experience in the game dev industry, working on IP's that include Mario, Transformers, Captain America and Mortal Kombat. He's done it all, from Game Designer, Producer, Creative Director and Executive Producer to GameDev.tv's very own Instructor extraordinaire. Tim Ruswick is a successful YouTuber and indie dev, who's created more than 30 games in the last 5 years (wow!), and joined GameDev.tv as our marketing monster).

Listen to the whole chat here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIYmGdm7NSI

Our 'AHA' moments

  • Unlike us, make sure your live stream doesn’t start with echoing 🤣
  • Antonia started with our Unity 3D course and is completely self taught!
  • The Quest 2 is a good option for a first time VR
  • Unity Learn is a good resource to learn additional Unity skills
  • Your code can be reused on other projects
  • Keep good documentation of your coding

What Does a Unity Evangelist Do? (17:40 - 19:12)

Being a Unity Evangelist can be quite a varied role. One day you could be creating demos about what Unity and Real Time 3D is all about for the sales team to go out and pitch to potential clients and on other days you could be creating onboarding documentation and videos to demonstrate how products within Unity work, such as documentation on how to get started with new products.

The role also includes talking to users and the development teams. Gathering user feedback to pass on to the development team and taking Unity’s learnings back into the community.

How Would I Get Into XR, AR or VR? (25:23 - 28:08)

The Unity website also provides a ton of courses on how to learn Unity, many of which include accreditations that lead to becoming a Unity approved developer.

Finding courses related to the topic you want to learn is a great way to become familiar with the skills required for the roles. Having a portfolio of the work you’ve produced in these roles will help when applying for jobs in those sectors.

Be sure to share your work on social media to gather feedback and get a hold of various devices to help in your XR journey. Most of us already own a smartphone and the Quest 2 is one of the best affordable VR headsets available on the market and it’s easy to develop for.

What Other Career Paths Are There Outside Of Games? (34:52 - 38:21)

Learning Unity can offer many more career opportunities, not just gaming. A lot of businesses in almost every industry now use AR or VR in ways you wouldn’t have imagined. For example, BIM (Building Information Modelling) professionals use AR and VR for architectural and structural data to create mock-ups of building plans to present to clients.

Engineers can use AR to fix machines by activating overlays for maintenance to see on their smartphones where something should be according to their data.

Basically, if you can think of any industry, there will be an advantage AR or VR can offer. Zoos use AR and VR to create interactive exhibits. Other industries include education, medical, travel and many more.

Advice On What To Say To Your Younger Self (1:27:14 - 1:29:11)

Don’t feel downbeat, have the feeling you don’t belong in this industry or experience imposter syndrome. Many well-established developers still experience these feelings and it is only natural.

Be persistent in learning, just because you watch a tutorial and you feel it doesn’t make sense it doesn’t mean you’re the one at fault. Maybe the tutorial is wrong or it’s out of date, therefore what you are being taught isn’t correct.

Try and watch 6-7 tutorials before changing your approach and don’t be scared to Google a lot. Experienced developers will still Google their coding problems. The technology world changes very quickly and Google is your best friend to help stay on top of that.

We hope Antonia’s journey helps inspire you in your game dev journey, never give up no matter your experience or background.

Follow Antonia On Social Media

https://twitter.com/AntoniaRForster
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/antonia-forster

Remember, we host live develogy livecasts every Tuesday at 10pm BST over on our Discord server. You can catch all the recordings, including this episode, in the Devology Livecast course - it's free to join and our YouTube Channel.

Until next time, happy dev'ing!