Intro

Learn About Unity!

What is Unity?

Unity is a versatile, widely used, cross-platform game engine created and released in 2005. With over 450,000 daily users, it has led to the creation of hundreds of thousands of games both at a professional and individual level. It can write programs for desktop, mobile, console, and VR platforms (most recently, extending to the Apple Vision SDK). It has a user-friendly interface and makes game development a seamless process. Unity supports both 2D and 3D development. Out of the box, it has a rich ecosystem of assets, plugins, and a vast community of developers. Unity has been and continues to be a go-to engine for many developers. Turn your wildest dreams into a reality with the Unity Game Engine!

Games made with Unity:

  1. Cuphead
  2. Hollow Knight
  3. Hearthstone`
  4. Among Us
  5. Pokemon Go
  6. Rust
  7. Fall Guys

Unity Hub:

The Unity Hub serves as a centralized management tool for Unity developers, streamlining the process of handling multiple Unity projects. It makes project management and organization efficient. Here, you can create new projects both in 2D and 3D within seconds. The Unity Hub also includes game templates to start with! This is super handy if you just want to get a feel for Unity, but I always recommend creating a skeleton project (2D or 3D core).

To get started, download the Unity Hub here!

Unity Editor:

The Unity Editor is the environment where you directly work on your projects. It offers a straightforward UI and is relatively quick to learn. Here you can edit all the components that are inside your game (scripts, artwork, lighting, objects, UI, etc). Scripts in Unity are typically written in a language called C# (similar to C++ or Java). Each script, when created, holds a template (more on this later). Unity ensures a smooth transition between scripting and a drag-and-drop user interface.

Installation of the Unity Editor is done through the Unity Hub!

VS Code:

For editing files and scripts in your project, feel free to use the IDE or text editor of your choice. Of course, with all of our classes, I recommend using Visual Studio Code as I think it is the most user-friendly and has lots of helpful extensions for advanced language support.

Visual Studio Code can be installed here

In the next few sections, we will create an empty project through the Hub and take a deep dive into the Unity Editor itself. In this course, we will not be making a functional game, we will only be discussing the editor and its features.