Tutorial Posting Guidelines

Introduction of this Guide

Posting a tutorial is easy and simple, but before you do post a tutorial there are a few things you must do first!

  1. You must become a member of the site before you are allowed to post anything on the site.
  2. You must have a working preview of the finished product to show at the beginning of the actual tutorial.

After that, you can begin!


The Title of the Tutorial

For titling a tutorial there are a few requirements of the title. Here are the requirements for a tutorial's title:

  1. The first part of your title should describe what it is about. For example:"FPS Tutorial for Unity 3D by (Your Name Here)".
  2. The second part of your title should say what it is made for. For example: "FPS Tutorial for Unity 3D by (Your Name Here)".
  3. The third part of your title should say By (Your Name). For example: "FPS Tutorial for Unity 3D __by (Your Name Here)".

This way we can distinguish tutorials with the same name between different authors. One thing you might be wondering is, "Why do I need to specify what it is made for? Isn't that pretty self-explanatory?" Well, yes, but actually no. You see Unity is a very powerful tool and can be used to create many things. If you label it as being made for Unity 3D, people should understand this is a tutorial for a 3D game, not a 2D one. If you label it as being made for Unity 2D, people should understand this tutorial you made is for a 2D game project, etc. Other times you might be creating a tutorial for a specific part of Unity like the animator component. If you are, then you'd say something like: "for Unity Animator Component" in the title.


Modules Required for Tutorials

The first thing your tutorial needs is a few modules. The modules in question? Well, you need a table of contents module, comments module, and a rating module. Now, how do you add these? Simple:

Table of Contents Module:

[[f<toc ]]

Rate Module:

[[>]]
[[module Rate]]
[[/>]]

Comments Module (Should be added at the end of a tutorial):

+ Comments
[[module Comments]]

And that's literally all you need to do for modules.


Optional Modules for Tutorials

If you want you can add an audio narration of your tutorial, to do this you need to embed an audio component. This is how you do it:

[[include :snippets:html5player|type=audio|url=audio file url]]

You will need to upload the audio file and get the URL and replace the text "audio file url" with the URL of your audio file. For more information on the audio player visit: HTML 5 Audio Player. I recommend if you do this, that you add a separate audio player for each chapter. More on chapters in the "Body of the Tutorial" section of this guide.


Previews of a Tutorial

Before typing out and then submitting any tutorial you are required to add a preview of the finished project, now you might be wondering what exactly I mean. Well, you have two options available:

  1. A Preview Image - A group of screenshots of the finished product. At least three images are required.
  2. A video gameplay - A video of you playing around with the finished product. We recommend you use either OBS or Bandicam to record a preview gameplay video.

Adding a preview image?

Adding an image is simple, Wikidot provides a button in the page editor, just click the "insert image wizard" button, and then type in the required image. Here is an example:

[[image source]]

Output:

js-tut-cube.png

How do I add a preview video?

Simply upload the video to a video sharing website (supported ones are listed here: Supported Video Sharing Platforms) like YouTube or Vimeo, and then use the "</>" button in the Page Editor to be able to add the embed code of the video. After you finish uploading you should be given an option to copy HTML Embed Code. Past the code in-between the [[HTML]] tags. Like this (this example uses YouTube):

[[html]]
<iframe width="[width of video player here]" height="[height of video player here]" src="[url of video here]" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
[[/html]]

Example In Action:

And that's how you show a preview of with either a Video Player or Image Carousel.


Introductions of the Tutorial

In the introduction section of your written tutorials, it is the time to introduce your reader to the topic, explain what you're going to be teaching, what software they need (other than unity), and how long the tutorial should take. In this section, you will need to also define any terminology the reader might not be familiar with either, and this includes physics equations as well. Here is an example of what your tutorials introduction should be formatted like:

+ Introduction:
Welcome to the tutorial on "How to Make A Working Weapon for Unity 3D". In this tutorial, you will learn how to develop a working weapon for your First Person Shooter Game Project! In this tutorial, you will need a text or script editor such as Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio Community Edition, Notepad ++, or MS Notepad. Which one you use is entirely up to you, but I recommend you use Either Visual Studio Community Edition or Notepad ++. This tutorial should only take a little over 15-30 minutes to complete depending on your typing speed, reading speed, and dedication to the project. Below are some terms you should familiarize yourself with:
* **Ray casting** - Ray casting is the use of ray–surface intersection tests to solve a variety of problems in 3D computer graphics and computational geometry.
* **Damage** - The amount of health a projectile can take from a game object.
* **Range** - The distance between two points.
* **Fire Rate** - How fast the weapon can fire within a given amount of time.
* **Muzzle Flash** - The flash produced by a weapon, usually a gun, after it has been fired.
* **Impact Effect** - The effect produced when a projectile hits a game object.
* **Impact Force** - The amount of Force Applied to a Rigid Body.
* **Rigidbody** - A physics game object, which can be affected by Gravity, Another Rigidbody, or any other objects that can interact with the colliders of that object.
* **Vector3** - A location in 3D space.
* **Audio Listener** - A Unity component that allows the player to listen to in-game audio.
* **Audio Source** - A Unity component that plays audio, which an Audio Listener can listen to.
* **Particle System** - A Unity component which spawns hundreds of particle that can make cool effects.
With that out of the way lets begin!

Now you're probably wondering what all those symbols mean or do, like why are there at-signs ("@"), asterisks ("*"), etc. Well, that's how you format text in Wikidot (which powers this service). This is a very basic example, some tutorials you make may have a fairly long introduction, don't worry. That is okay! You're teaching something to someone who has no idea what you are talking about (generally). Now, with that being said, let's continue to the next section! The body of the tutorial.


The Body of the Tutorial

Now, this is where the fun part is. This will include everything that actually teaches the reader how to do the specific task that you're teaching. This section can include only images and text. Why you may ask? Well, it's quite simple actually. This website was made to share typed-tutorials. Not video ones, you use sites like YouTube or Vimeo for that. How you format this section is up to you, I recommend doing chapters by using the header tag (click the H1 button in the page editor, then replace the highlighted text with the actual chapter text). Here is an example:

+ Chapter 1 | Setting Up the Scene
In this chapter we will be setting up the scene, this includes all of the game objects, components, etc…

Now that's not a full chapter for a reason, the first reason is you probably wouldn't read it all since this is a guide on how to write a tutorial for this site which would make typing out a full chapter pointless; the second is we have to make it short for this guide. If you hover over the "H1" Button you can view "H2 -> H6" each of these is a different sized heading. Use these at your discretion. You will notice that if you use headers, they will be displayed in the table of contents, this is especially useful for long or very long tutorials. That way you can "jump" to sections. Take your time explaining everything, your tutorial won't get good ratings if you rush it. You can add images in this section to help describe the process.


The Conclusion of the Tutorial

In this section, you will want to congratulate the user on completing the tutorial, give a short recap of what they have learned from this tutorial, and how they can use it in the future, then finally finish with a closing statement. And that is how your tutorials should be formatted on this site. I hope you all can make great tutorials and help teach all of the Young Ones who learn better via text-based lessons rather than video-taught lessons. That finishes up this part of the guide, just a few more things below and you're all set to make amazing high-quality tutorials for the world to read!


Bibliography of the Tutorial

If you used open-source code or any images from somewhere else in your tutorial reference it here to give the original authors of the code or images some credits. Include a link to their website or the web address of where you got the code or image. Include the name of the license it was published with as well if available. See Image Use Policy before using external images that you don't own.


Concluding this Guide

You're now ready to tackle the process of developing a tutorial for the Unity Game Engine on this site. A few tips before you begin:

  • Be detailed when creating tutorials. It's not a good tutorial if it doesn't actually teach a newbie anything.
  • Don't rush the creation of the tutorial, some of the best tutorials are well thought out and took days to develop.
  • Brainstorm your tutorial beforehand, type it in a program like Word Pad, Notepad, Microsoft Office Word, or even FreeOffice.
  • Check grammar with free services like Grammar Check or Grammarly.
  • Proof Read your tutorial to make sure it makes sense!
  • Get a friend to read it, get feedback before you post!
  • Use the "Preview" and "Save Draft" button, they were made for a reason.
  • Save your draft progress often. You don't want to write an entire tutorial just to have the power shut off and you lose all of that progress!
  • As long as you get a 90 or above in Grammarly's scoring you can publish. If not, work on that grammar, spelling, and punctuation!

NOTE: The "Save Button" is technically a Publish Button, don't publish/save an article until you are completely done with typing it.

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License