Game development has never been this easier since the era of game engines. In the early, you might need to write a bunch of codes even to draw a single pixel on the screen. Well, thanks to game engines all the hard part (like rendering, physics) will be done with it so finally we can focus on our imaginations and creativity. And Yes!, the availability of free game engines makes it even better and I might say it’s possible for you to develop games with minimal programming skill or no programming skills at all using these engines.
So what are these game engines..? How will it help you make games..?
Let’s have a look at some game engine terms.
Game Engines
Game engines are nothing but software development kit (SDK) which comprises of the essential tools/components required to make a graphical application.
As illustrated above, a game engine can be subdivided into the following essential modules.
Rendering - The process of generating visual output from a collective 2D/3D data using complex algorithms.
Physics - Handles dynamics and simulation of certain physical systems such as collision detection, rigid body/soft body dynamics, cloth, fluid.
Audio - Process audio streams to be played in a 2D or 3D space.
Networking - Handles data for multiplayer games.
AI (Artificial Intelligence) - Complex algorithms to drive the behavior of a NPC (Non-Playable Character) or the game environment.
User Controls - Handles user inputs from various input devices such as Keyboard, Mouse, Joysticks into a program readable format.
These modules reduces the complexity in development since the engine will handle the core functionalities and provides us a suite of visual development tools. Another significant feature of a modern game engine is that it supports CROSS PLATFORM DEVELOPMENT, which means we can develop for one particular platform that we desire and with less effort, we can port our product to other required platforms.
Moreover, the advent of game engines narrowed the border between the designers and developers and brought them to a combined work environment.
Game Engines can be classified based on several aspects like the rendering style (2D/3D), the scripting language, whether it’s open source or not and so on. Other than unity, these are some of the game engines which are open to the world.
Unreal Engine
Cocos2D
Blender Game Engine
MonoGame
CryEngine
Ogre3D
Amazon Lumberyard
So Wait! There are game engines not available to the public ?
Yes. They are in-house (proprietary) game engines developed by game studios exclusively for development within the studio. These are some of them.
UbiArt (Ubisoft Studios)
Anvil Next (Ubisoft Studios)
MT Framewodk (Capcom)
Luminous Studio (Square Enix)
Ignite (EA Games)
A detailed list of game engines can be found in this Wiki
Now that we have an idea about game engines, lets get into Unity.
Getting Unity
Unity is an advanced yet simple to use game engine which packs the capability of a full fledged AAA game development environment along with the fascinating cross platform build support. So without any delay, let’s try the Unity engine by getting it from here.
Well, which to choose from the store ? Let me give you a quick tour on the options there.
Personal Edition (Free) — Completely free, you can develop games and distribute with it but with some certain limitations (company annual gross revenue should be less than $100k) and your build will have Unity Technologies logo on startup.
Plus Edition (Billable)— This package comes with the Unity Pro skin for the editor along with some profiling, analytics tools, more platforms, asset-store offers and more. And yes, the Unity splash screen can be removed in this version.
Pro Edition (Billable) —Provides all the features of Plus version additionally with premium services and engine source-code access for purchase.
Enterprise Edition — Meant for large organization with access to the Unity source codes and enterprise support.
For a beginner, its best to stick with the Personal Edition for learning and prototyping purposes. Once you get into production and publishing, you can move to the billable versions so that you wont break your wallet.
So click on “Try Personal” link to download the “Unity Download Assistant”
(Note- If you are on a Mac, choose the Mac OS X version)
Launch the “Unity Download Assistant” executable, accept the EULA and click next until you get to choose the required “Components”
From Unity 5.0 onwards, the installer split components so that we get to choose which all components gets installed. Here are some quick notes on some of the components.
Unity 20XX.X.XfX — This is the core development software which provides a nice editor UI with all the necessary tools.
Documentation — Provides full offline documentation for Unity Editor and the script classes.
Standard Assets — Includes the Unity starter kit containing game assets and codes which help you get started on various topics. (Moved to Unity Store since v2018)
Visual Studio Community Edition — I recommend choosing this component for scripting or you can install other code editors like Visual Studio Code or Monodevelop externally.
iOS Build Support & Android Build Support — If you are planning to build for Android or iOS you should check these modules.
Finish through the installation and you can launch Unity editor from desktop (from LaunchPad for Mac).
You can sign in using your existing unity account or create a new free account by clicking the ‘create one’ button and the website will guide you through the account creation.
(Note — You can skip the Sign In/Sign Up but an account is required to download/make purchases from Unity Asset Store through the editor)
After logging in using your Unity account, you should be looking at the Project dialog window. This is where your recent projects on your machine or cloud are displayed. Since I believe this is your first time, you can click on the ‘New’ button to create your new project.
The Unity dialog will now ask you to enter your project information. The project name can be whatever you like and not necessarily same as your required Product name. You can provide the Product name that you wish to appear in the build later in Unity.
Congratulations! You’ve successfully installed Unity game engine. Now you can start learning and turn your beautiful ideas into great games. Hopefully I will come up with some fascinating Unity tutorials. Until then Bye…
Happy Coding!
