Learning Unity
A few weeks ago, I volunteered to work at the Southern Interactive Entertainment & Game Expo (which I’m pretty sure is just a backronym for SIEGE), hosted by the Georgia Game Developers Association. It was a great event, with lots of industry professionals looking to network with students looking for jobs in the games industry. While there, I attended a few panels with really great game designers and programmers.
Chris DeLeon, in particular, was excellent. Sidebar: in looking for a link to add to his name, I found out he has a Unity tutorial on his site here, so I’m definitely going to be watching that! Anyways, he brought up the idea of quick iteration and rapid game development, which struck a chord with me and my quick-to-switch-projects nature. So hopefully, Unity’s quick learning curve and rapid prototyping will help me stay interested in it enough to see a project all the way through.
So what exactly is “Unity”? Unity is a 3-D game development engine – that is, software that helps you create and run 3D video games. It’s similar to the Unreal engine, Quake engine, or the Source engine , but simplified and streamlined – making it the perfect choice for a first-time game designer. Unity uses scripts written in C#, JavaScript, or Boo (which I’ve never even heard of). According to the Unity subreddit, C# is the crowd favorite language to use for new programmers, so that’s what I’ll be going with.
I’m going to be posting any examples or test games I make, along with some commentary about what I’ve done and how I did it. Hopefully over time I’ll be able to look back and see the improvements I make. In the mean time, check out this Unity tutorial from InfiniteAmmo: