Lynda.com: Become a Unity 2D Developer (Day 1)

Welcome to my learning blog!  Admittedly, I should have started this a long time ago, but I guess better late than never.

Today on my learning adventures, I am diving deep into my Lynda.com subscription and getting back into the Unity Developer track. Most of the learning material is focused on teaching the GUI, importing assets, and other "minor but important" concepts and ideas when using the Unity Developer/Design application.

Things learned:

• Batch draws are efficient ways of rendering graphics. It improves loading times, which will always create a better user experience. 

• Creating animations in the Unity environment utilizes the same core animation concepts much prior experiences, specifically Flash. 
 
• Create simple sprite animations, while using transitions and AnimState values to test them accordingly.  Following the tutorial, I was able to create 4 character game states, specifically idle, walk, jet, and empty.

• 2 types of hit detection: Box Collider 2D and Polygon Collider 2D.
  Physics manipulation by X and Y values, specifically the gravity.  The example below shows increasing the negative values, increases the intensity and direction of the gravity pull.

• Next is another example of collision detection is Circular Collider 2D.  The X and Y vales are a bit more conservative than the prior, but notice how the collision changes the dynamics of the player's physics.