When making a game, one of the most important decisions you have to make is choosing the framework you’ll use. Be it a custom engine, a generic framework or a drag-and-drop editor, you’ll always need to take in consideration what kind of game you want to make and what platforms you’ll be deploying to.
In this syllabus, we’ll take a look at the Unity engine: we’ll discuss its pros and cons, its basic workflow and its best usage cases.

Unity is one of the most popular game engines out there and has been used to make several AAA games and high-quality indie games, but it still manages to be very beginner friendly.

Unity is a fully-fledged game engine with a built-in drag and drop editor. Its main focus is 3D games, but you can also build 2D games with it, and lately there have been multiple improvements in this area.

Unity runs on Mac and Windows, and it has an experimental Linux editor that is not as stable as the others.
Unity’s recent versions only support 64bit versions of windows, so if you are running a 32bit version of the OS, you’ll have to pick up an older version.

Unity allows you to program your game using two programming languages: C# and UnityScript

C# is the best language to use with Unity as of right now. Most tutorials and resources use it, and it is simply better than the other option. Unity supports C# 4.0 and .Net* 3.5. C# 6.0 and .Net* 4.6 are in an experimental phase. For those of you who don’t know, .Net is a software framework developed by Microsoft. Specifically in Unity, it allows you to use System namespaces (libraries) among other things. You can read more about it here and here.

Deployment – Unity exports to pretty much every possible platform: Mobile, Consoles, PC, VR, you name it, with minor porting and platform specific features needed.

Take a look at the full export list here.

You can download Unity here.

It is recommended to have at least 15GB of free space in your hard drive, since Unity quickly takes up a lot of room in your HDD.

When it comes to learning game engines, there is not a definite path to go down.

Some people like learning the programming languages this way, some people like learning that way.

Alright, so you have the world’s most lit game. What do you do now? You release it of course! Video games are an artform, and even if some people don’t believe that to be true, you should want others to play your games!

There are many places where you can release your projects. Some of them are more complicated to get onto that others (Steam versus itch.io), but once you release your game, people you have never met before will be able to play it and give you valuable feedback.

One of the biggest issues beginners make when using unity is setting unreasonable scopes. I’ve seen many cases where people who just started out go out and make a “team” to make the next GTA6. Let’s think for a second here – GTA5 was a multi-million dollar game with hundreds of people working on it simultaneously.

There’s no way a team of beginners can deliver a product of such quality.

One of Unity’s greatest features is its Asset Store – a marketplace where developers can submit their assets and put them up for sale. All packages are verified by unity to make sure they’re legit, and the platform is run by Unity themselves.

There are so many possibilities – from node-based Material Editors to 3D Model Generators to Low Poly Water shaders.