Had to make this post out of extreme frustration and with the hope that I save others some of their hard earned money.
Do NOT pay for tutorials at Zenva Academy’s site. I have been struggling to learn game development in the Defold engine because I feel likethere isn’t much out there to help you learn Defold as it isn’t as popular as, say, Unity or Unreal. So I paid for a year subscription at zenva to gain access to their Defold Learning path. I Go through the learning Defold from scratch tutorial series with no problem, but then I start the “build a 2d platformer” tutorial series and…issues. The game isn’t working as intended, so I thought: “ok, I definitely did something wrong”. After going through the videos a few times I realize, “NO! I didn’t do anything wrong”. I’ve followed everything to a T. So I then download the lesson source code so I can copy and paste the script from the lesson itself and… same problem! So yea, I wasted 80 bucks specifically to learn from the only series on Defold in this site, to find out that its completely outdated and useless.
Finally, I decide this isn’t going to work for me and tr to get a refund as I’ve only had a paid account for less than a week. Lo and behold! Zenva does not give refunds on subscription accounts! F**cking WOW! If anyone out there is considering to self learn how to gamedev, especially in defold, IGNORE ZENVA ACADEMY! I just wasted money and time that I can’t get back. Don’t make the same mistake. Avoid like the plague.
Yeah… I didn’t pay for a subscription but I thought the free tutorial that Zenva academy offers looked shite and since I gave them my email, all they do is constantly send me an email every other day asking me to buy a subscription. I didn’t stick with them mainly because it’s clear that they are more concerned with making tutorials for bigger engines such as Unity, Unreal, Godot etc. Especially considering, that I found it difficult to navigate to Defold tutorials through their own site.
Tactx Studio’s videos are great for beginners. They might be slightly old, but they should still work. Also, you can ask for help here if you get stuck at any point—and they’re free!
Unfolding Gamedev also has great videos for a wide range of users.
I more meant that it was hard to find tutorials for Defold on Zenva’s site. On Defold’s site, it is very easy to navigate to tutorials and I started out with the engine by looking at the endless runner tutorial.
I’ve looked at some of Tactx Studio’s videos as well and although I found some parts confusing (mostly due to programming inexperience) I felt that the guy walked through the steps well although sometimes a little slowly haha.
I’ve also checked the Course Issue log and the only entry since a small unrelated error we corrected back in September, is your entry about collision detection. Normally, if we have a progress-blocking error we hear about it right away from multiple (rightfully angry) people, not 9 months since the course was released:
I can’t proceed with the tutorial because there’s something wrong with the code I can’t figure out how to fix it. I’m up the the player collision part and I copied the code EXACTLY as the video, I checked multiple times and even compared with the full source code but instead of the player object landing on the ground tile, it slowly sinks into it. Please provide a fix for this as it’s not right that I paid for this course but continue because of this issue.
I’m not saying the course is perfect - there might be errors. Could you try these two things and we can debug further if it doesn’t work?
Firstly, make sure to use the exact version of Defold as instructed in the course, which is 1.8.1. Note we will be updating the Defold courses yearly as we do with our Unity courses.
Download the complete project from the Course Files tab. Compare your code and setup with the complete project.
Please let me know if you’ve tried both things and we can look further into it if you are still having the issue.
Ok, after working through the project tirelessly for hours and hours literally all weekend, literally, obsessively watching every tutorial video multiple times, I FINALLY figured out the problem. Honestly, the solution was so small, I’m not even going to admit to what it was because I’m honestly ashamed of how stupid I am for missing such a small thing. I will, however, apologize for being so aggressive and being so negative about the whole thing and I hope I didn’t influence a single person away from Zenva Academy or the Defold tutorials series there. I think…I should probably sleep more instead of obsessing over trying to learn how to code. I’ve been putting a lot of pressure on myself because I’m desperate to create a game worth playing (been a life long dream) and I think the way I’m going about it is not good for my mood or mental health. Again, I’m deeply sorry.
No worries. I can really recommend taking regular breaks from your work. Go for a walk. Take a nap. Watch a tv-series. Let your brain focus on something else for a while. It will still passively and unconciously do some game dev work for you and you’ll be able to look at your game/problem with fresh eyes!
I would reccomend that when listing courses on game development that you list your free Defold course further up. Above it on the list are several Defold courses that can’t be accessed without entering card payment details which is quite innaccessible for younger people who want to get into programming. I would aslo reccomend that you make it so you can filter for Defold courses.
It does look as though the courses have changed since I looked last year so I do apologise for being harsh. It was a while since I tried with the course but when I did, I navigated to it through the Defold site but it was quite hard for me to do so. When I try to access it now (so I could try to retrace my steps and give you more infomation) it shows me a blank page and says a subscription has been removed from my cart.
My main criticism is that the courses on Defold’s actual site are a lot more accessible and appear more interesting/clear. The free course that I’m looking at is obviously a comprehensive course on how the engine works but it doesn’t give the user a clear picture of what they’re going to achieve. It doesn’t, for example, say “we’re going to start with making a 2D platformer and then move on to 3D games” which would make people more likely to continue the course. Your course also appears to require watching videos which works for some but can be difficult when trying to search for mistakes in code. I understand that you do have lesson notes however, it would be a lot easier if there were pictures provided for what you are explaining. I would also like to point out that your video captions are autogenerated an inaccurate which makes them inaccesible for those deaf/hoh.
Looking at the courses today, I do think that I was overly harsh and reactionary however, I do believe that there are quite a few improvements that can be made for Zenva handling Defold tutorials. Thank you for taking the time to accept criticism. It is a lot more than other people would do
Thank you for your response and I’m happy to hear that you found the source of the issue! Also apologies if my response was a bit defensive.
If you could modify the subject of this thread by adding something like '[SOLVED]" that would be amazing, as most people won’t read down the comments… only if that works for you…
As for refunds, if you are still looking for a refund could you open a ticket here and link to this thread in the message: Zenva Academy - Submit a Ticket
