Learning Unity - Introduction

At the recommendation of a game designer I know, I enrolled in the GameDev.tv beginner Unity package to get to grips with a bigger, more widely used engine. I have extensive experience with Godot, as well as with languages like C++, Python, and C, but I figured I'd start with the basics for a new engine and new language, that way I can focus on building good habits and techniques.

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We started by making a basic car in an empty scene using the basic 3D shapes within Unity. As a challenge, I added some small details like a grille on the front and a rear exhaust pipe. Once we built it in the main scene, we created it as a prefab, that way we can make a change in the prefab scene to the car, and all instances of that prefab will receive the change.

The next task was to create 2 additional prefabs to fill out our scene. I made a house and sidewalk to make a small residential neighborhood. This was more of an expansion on the previous section than anything, still fun nonetheless! Being able to make an (admittedly amateurish) environment this fast makes me very excited to get to grips with more of Unity's tools.

The next step was to write this small script in Visual Studio (which I'll refer to as VS for my sanity) and connect it to an element in the Unity scene.

After attaching the script to an arbitrary car and running the scene, this was the output. Stunning, I know. This was one of those things that, even if it's very basic in the grand scheme of things, it still feels cool to have a text editor like VS be able to communicate with Unity.

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What I Learned

With this being my first time ever using Unity as a game engine, it's a little hard to narrow down what I learned. The general flow of creating and arranging 3D objects is similar to Godot, and I've done plenty of scripting in VS in my time, but none of this was ever in the context of Unity so it all feels relatively fresh. However, if I had to narrow down the skills to a list it would look like this:

• Creating 3D objects in a scene

• Creating prefabs from groups of objects

• Getting Visual Studio Code and Unity to talk to each other (nicely)

• Write, attach, and run a script in VS and Unity