A few months ago, in October to be exact, I noticed a little posting in the Unity forums, asking for a Unity trainer. I did hesitate a moment at first, not really feeling like getting myself into any kinds of obligations - but then I felt like it should be very interesting to teach about Unity. I've been doing trainings before, albeit about much less interesting subjects (like, um, Windows 2000, Visual Basic ... basic Windows networking, OMG!!!)

So I replied to the request and got myself ready for two days of introducing and teaching Unity. The idea was to have a little project for the workshop that we could use as a common theme to introduce not only various aspects of Unity but also a few general ideas about game development; or from a more general perspective: development of interactive 3d-applications. As anyone who ever got into game development can certainly, tell, 2 days for a project is a big plan. So one thing that's been troubling me for a little while was: What to do?

One morning, about a week before the workshop, I finally got distracted in one of my meditations by what seemed to be the solution: Bowling. It's simple (if you make it so), it uses physics, it provides a lot of room for creativity (for students who get the basics quickly and want to do fun stuff while I'm busy explaining the basics to the rest of the participants). Thought, said and done.

While preparing my slides, I realized I needed a name for the game. That's always the most difficult part, isn't it? However, I didn't feel like torturing myself and simply went with Bowling for Unity. That seemed like a rather dumb name to me at first, to be honest ... but after a while I realized that it's the perfect name.

Anyways, I still had one kind of funny obstacle to overcome: The workshop started Monday at 10am. I had made room Saturday and Sunday for my preparation. However, Saturday I still had an appointment that took much longer than I had anticipated and I finally ended up actually getting into the workshop around 5pm. One reason I wanted Saturday to be "available" to me was because I had this funny thought that I might still need to buy something. I didn't have an idea what that could be and didn't spend much time digging into it but felt like it would be good to have the Saturday for such a kind of thing.

Well, it's not too hard to guess, I guess: At 9:30pm I found out what it was (shops close at 8pm in Germany): To connect my new MacBook Pro to the video projector, I need an adaptor. As much as I like Apple - needing an extra adaptor just to connect the Mac to a video project seems kind of ridiculous. Anyways, no shops had opened. So I went onto quite a journey to somehow be able to use my fine Keynote presentation properly. One nice thing is that you can export Keynote presentations to QuickTime. So, I decided to prepare one of my old Dell laptops for "just in case". Sunday, I spent half the day calling a colleague, asking if he had such an adaptor ... visiting him just to find out that the adaptor he had was the wrong one ... going into the company with him hoping that one of the Mac minis had the proper adaptor ... but guess what: all to no avail.

So, I checked the shops at the location where I was to give the workshop. Well, there were a few who would have such an adaptor - but they'd all open at 10am, which was when my workshop started. I even sent one of those shops an e-mail asking if they could let me in early so I could get that damned adaptor.

The funny thing is: All the time I was aware that there was the possibility that they'd have such adaptors at the academy. But I wasn't sure, and at that point in time, I couldn't ask. So I did my best to be sure without relying on them having such adaptors.

Got to the hotel at Sunday, 1am (well, I really was busy on Sunday and it was a 2h drive). And, to my fortunate surprise found out the next morning that they did have such adaptors. And - just to ridicule my fear of not being prepared well-enough - they had lots and lots of them. That was funny ... at least I thought it was ;-)

Anyways, the workshop itself went pretty well. It's a great pleasure to teach Unity simply because it's such a great tool. So, when people get in touch with it, they love it - and that obviously helps when you're the teacher. It was a lot of fun hangin' out with the students and talking about Unity, their studies and their projects. We got our Bowling for Unity project done - even though we had to cheat quite a bit (well, in the end, I had most things prepared so I could just "pull them through" when it turned out our schedule was slipping badly ;-) ).

It was a really great experience for me, certainly to be repeated (anyone needs Unity trainings? ;-) ).

I'm considering making Bowling for Unity an actual little side-project. I have a few ideas that would make it fit perfectly into the concept of RaMtiGA (you know, bowling for unity certainly helps raise consciousness - as unity is where we need to go). I'm not perfectly sure yet, because it obviously would distract from development of Traces of Illumination which already is going extremely slow. On the other hand, it would be a very small little project that I could complete "in-between", and I guess it would be fun, too. So ... I'll see where inspiration takes me ;-)

Today is December, 24th ... so I guess I better don't end this posting without a heartfelt: Merry Christmas!!!