Introduction and Unity Lesson 1

This is the welcome video and first lesson from our mini-course on the Unity Game Engine.

We’re adding a bunch of free course content to the site. This post includes the welcome video and lesson 1 (scroll down).

Included in each lesson

• Instructional videos
• PDF Manual for Unity troubleshooting and tips
• Transcript of the videos in case you want to print them out

Introduction Video Transcript

Hey there everyone. Welcome to our introduction to Unity mini course. In this course, you’ll learn what unity is, why it’s great, what you can do with it, and how to make your first scene.

Before we start, I wanted to explain a bit about how this platform works though. Once you’ve started the course by jumping into your first lecture, you’ll see the curriculum broken down on the left in an easy to navigate fashion.

We’ve designed this course to be completed in order one lesson at a time.

However, having these individual lessons makes it easier for you to revisit any specific parts of the course if you need.

You’ll also notice that within each lesson we’ve included a short quiz as well as some supplemental learning material just to help you out.

At the top left of your screen, you’ll see a way to navigate back as well as this nice little gear icon.

This lets you control your playback settings while you’re going through all of the lessons towards the bottom right in the video player itself.

We have another gear icon, which lets you change your resolution and the speed the video plays at all of the videos are shot in hd, so we recommend using the highest settings your computer can handle.

I just wanted to say thank you all for your interest in this course and for enrolling.

This one just covers the basics of unity from installation and account creation to the very basics of setting up a project.

But the next lessons that we already have planned cover even more. Really cool game development stuff and I’m excited to share all of it with you. Thank you so much.

Lesson 1 Video Transcript

Hey there everyone. Welcome to the first installment of our new tutorial series for game developers.

This series is specifically focused on unity development, and for this episode we’ll be explaining why we chose Unity and why we think you’ll get a lot out of that engine.

I’m Rob Mitchell, a technical game designer from Burlington, Vermont. I’ve been doing Unity game development for around five years now, and I’m really excited to share what I’ve learned so far with all of you.

In preparation for this series, I’ve made this small slideshow here outlining a few key things about Unity that make it special, so let’s get into it. If you’ve used Unity before, I still implore you to join me for this presentation since you might learn something new.

Anyway. So first things first, what is Unity? Well, unity is a game engine, meaning it’s a tool that’s built specifically to help us with every aspect of game development.

(00:54)
We as developers can provide assets like art code, music and more, and Unity acts as a central place where we can take all of that and turn it into a full video game.

Additionally, it helps us edit and test the game in many, many different ways. We’ll explore some of those features in a later lesson for now, know that it’s really flexible and it’s very helpful for us developers.

Also, unity includes many tools to make our lives much easier. This includes visual popups that display information like little Windows, as well as some libraries that make the lives of programmers much easier.

So there’s a lot of little helpful features for every kind of developer. Now, I know a question a lot of people are wondering is what kinds of games can be made with Unity? The answer in my opinion, is literally every kind of game.

(01:48)
If you quickly look up games made in Unity, you can find a ton of different games across different genres, most of which you’ve probably even heard of.

For now, I’ve just listed every genre I could think of in one minute where there’s a game that I have specifically played before that was made in Unity. So now moving on, I’ve decided to compare three engines I’ve used quite a bit before. That would be Unity, unreal, and GameMaker.

I came up with a few things on the left, a couple features that I think are important to me as a game developer as well as I think are important to some other developers. Just to summarize, because I don’t want to go through every single point on this table, these top two rows are basically how important it is to me to have every kind of game be possible.

We kind of went over that on the last slide, but here I’ve just summarized it as two D and three D. I also think it’s really important for new developers as well as even experienced developers because there’s always something new to learn.

I think it’s important to have good documentation online and good tutorials online. Now, the

(02:58):
Flexible Editor is kind of like those cool tools that we were talking about before, and that’s something that we can cover in a later lesson as well.

Kind of like visual scripting, which Unity doesn’t support by default or the others do, but you can download something from the Unity Asset Store in order to bypass the need to program things on your own.

I’ve also included these last two rows, the Steam and Epic game store Row, just to show that all of these engines can have their games be made and built out, and then you can put them on all of the common stores you’ve heard of Steam, epic Itch io and more.

Now, I know there’s a few people who will still feel nervous about starting off with Unity, but I want to assure you that Unity is for everyone.

Tutorials like this are specifically designed with complete beginners in mind, including those who don’t know any code at all, but we still can offer some important tidbits of advice valuable to those who have used other engines or other programming languages in the past.

(04:04)
Unity is really good for people who do know a little bit of code already and are looking for something new.

But again, even if you don’t know any code, unity is still a great fit. Now, this is kind of just a fun fact, I guess, but you can use Unity for non-game development purposes.

I’m assuming if you’re watching this, it’s because you want to do game development, but it is important to know that there are people like scientists and researchers who use this engine to perform tests and simulate certain behaviors.

Unity is just extremely flexible, and it can do more than you probably thought of when you were going into this tutorial.

Now, I think that just about covers everything for the intro.

In the next lesson, we’re going to actually get started with Unity by going over the software that we need, and I’ll lead you through the actual process of downloading and installing it.

By the end of the next episode, we’re going to have the latest version of Unity running and ready to go.