A game developer who spent three years developing games with Unity and even making money from it realized it was all a mistake, and is now using vibe coding to warn aspiring programmers.
Dirk Tomic, who spent three years creating games with Unity and never doubted he was a developer, says that 'one question made me realize I wasn't a developer,' and explains how he had been learning about Unity the wrong way.
How I learned Unity the wrong way | Darko Unity - Unity Learning Community
Tomic has been developing games using Unity for three years. He says he learned how to use Unity by watching countless tutorial videos on YouTube, including Brackeys , a site that distributes free tutorials for developers, CodeMonkey , where beginners can learn programming, and the YouTube channel of game developer Jason Weimann . However, it seems that he didn't really study Unity, but rather just paused the videos and copied and pasted the code.
Using this method, Tomic developed ' Skeletons AR, ' an AR game for Android. At the time of Skeletons AR's release, most AR games simply involved rotating 3D markers in AR, but Tomic's Skeletons AR was a full-fledged game that included combat elements. Skeletons AR took about a month to develop and quickly gained attention on Reddit after its release, making Tomic say, 'I felt like I had become something special.' In fact, some on Reddit praised Tomic as a 'programmer on the level of John D. Carmack (founder of id Software).'
However, in reality, most of the game's processing is handled by the Vuforia SDK , and Tomic only wrote about five scripts. He created Skeletons AR by copying and pasting tutorials he found in various places and piecing together scripts posted on forums. Tomic says, 'I can't accurately explain a single system within Skeletons AR.'
Therefore, Tomic was unable to debug Skeletons AR when something broke. Or rather, he apparently didn't know what debugging was. So, at the time, Tomic was debugging by repeatedly making a tedious process of changing one line of code, pressing the play button to check if it worked, making another change, and pressing the play button again.
Whenever Tomic needed new code, he would open Unity's official forums, Reddit, or tutorial videos on YouTube, find someone who had already done what he was trying to do, and simply copy their script. This allowed him to develop multiple games, but he couldn't explain what he had created, nor could he write any scripts from scratch. As a result, he remained ignorant of the fundamentals of programming.
At some point, Tomic felt guilty because he was relying too much on Google search. So, he directly searched on Google for 'Do senior developers use Google?'. He found that every forum and Q&A site answered 'yes,' which led him to believe that he didn't need to change his development methods.
At the time, Tomic was playing Skyrim, which was riddled with bugs. Because bugs were considered normal in Skyrim on every forum, Tomic felt that 'bugs are normal' in games. Furthermore, Tomic had absolutely no concept of
Once he started working on projects with a dedicated quality assurance team, the team began to find bugs that Tomic had overlooked. Initially, Tomic disliked the quality assurance team, feeling as if they were telling him, 'There are flaws in your work,' but he writes that he learned what was lacking in his programming through his interactions with the team.
Tomic said, 'Even people who aren't programmers can create AR content without writing any code. That's because there are already open-source projects that have solved the difficult parts. Looking back now, I don't understand why such an application was open source. But it was incredibly valuable, and thanks to it I was able to make a profit of $20,000 (approximately 3.2 million yen).'
Furthermore, Tomic did not use any source code management at all. He once experienced a project crash that wiped everything out. However, because there was a base open-source project and he was familiar with what he had written, Tomic says he was able to rebuild the project in just a few days. This experience led Tomic to start using Git.
Furthermore, despite having developed games with Unity for three years, Tomic was once shown a vast difference in programming knowledge by a man who had only used Blender for a few months. This man apparently wrote Python code within Blender and wrote scripts from scratch. As a result, although he didn't consider himself a programmer, he seemed to have a solid grasp of the fundamentals of programming. In contrast, while Tomic held the title of programmer, his usage history meant he had absolutely no foundation in programming.
Tomic was asked various questions by this man, but he was unable to answer them correctly, and the project ultimately ended in failure. Tomic then pitched the man to a friend's company, and the man eventually became a respected figure in the game industry, working at a renowned studio. Regarding the difference between himself and the man, Tomic said, 'The difference between us wasn't in experience, but in how we learned.'
Tomic interviewed for a job at a company in Belgrade, Serbia. At the time of the interview, AI was not as widespread as it is today, and he said he was confident he would be hired because he had managed to create a pretty good-looking game in just seven days.
However, the interviewer checked the game Tomic had developed and asked, 'Why did you use the Queue[T] class ?' Since Tomic had simply copied and pasted from the CodeMonkey tutorial as usual, he couldn't explain why he used it. In fact, he didn't even understand how the Queue[T] class worked.
Tomic continued to go through multiple job interviews. He had a track record and impressive demos prepared. However, when asked technical questions about the games he had developed, he was unable to answer anything and failed job interviews repeatedly. Even so, Tomic told himself that 'the companies that rejected me weren't right for me,' and he explained that the reason was 'because I watched too many self-help videos on YouTube.'
Nevertheless, after repeated failures, Tomic finally stopped blaming others and decided to start learning from scratch. 'For a long time I thought that my failed interview in Belgrade was a turning point in my life, but in reality I had been failing continuously for three years since I started developing with Unity,' Tomic said, admitting that his approach was wrong from the start.
At the time of writing, Tomic claims that his incorrect programming method is ' vibecoding ' itself. 'I'm worried about beginners who are developing with vibecoding right now. The project may look great, but there is no understanding at its core,' Tomic warns.
Related Posts:
