Unity Game Engine
In a world crazy about technology where billions have access to a smartphone or some other cool gadgets, it’s pretty obvious that most of us like to spend hours on and on playing games on screens from fitting in our palm's width to 4K ultrawide desktops. The different experiences and escape from reality to live a new adventure, are far too tempting.
But have you ever given a thought as to how all this comes to life? What makes these little creatures on the screen, mere pixels colored differently so alive? You can imagine a whole lot about how this magic comes to be, but it's an entirely different story.
Game Engines
It's not the same kinda analogy we use to describe vehicles and engines. But it is more often relatable. A Game Engine is a platform, a software environment that provides us with all the features we need to make Video Games. From how the characters will look, what will move, and how? Who's your enemy and when do you win or lose?
Everything we do in the games boils down to a glorious collection of tools written and joined together very neatly by a game engine.
Hey, enough about all this engine stuff. Let's get to the main course…
What’s Unity?
Not in the context of the holding the world together in peace concept. It’s a game engine, got it!!!
Unity or Unity 3D is a popular free to use (for personal use) game engine, that allows you to build quality 2D, 3D as well as AR and VR applications across platforms and with a wide feature set for control over Graphics, Networking, Audio, Physics, Animations, and this and that, in a easy and simple way for even those new to game development.
Unity is the prime choice for those just starting to dip their curious fingers into the realm of game development.
Now Let’s install it
As of 2018, Unity is now supported across Windows, Linux, and macOS
Unity Technologies (the official name), had been working on a project management tool called Unity Hub which allows you to manage the different versions of Unity installed on your system, quickly access your project's library and even grab them from the cloud.
And trust when it comes to software releases Unity is very tedious to keep up with.
Setting that aside, the first step is to get Unity Hub. So head over to this link for Windows and macOS:
For Linux users, it's a little tricky as the software is still buggy, but there is support and more plans on the way.
https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-hub-v-1-6-0-is-now-available.640792/
This is what you are greeted with once the software is installed:
Now you need to sign in with your Unity account or create one for starters if you don't have one.
Next Unity requires you to have a license. Worry not you don’t need to pay anything unless you earn more than $100,00 annually. If not you can have a Personal license free of cost. Just go over the Activate New License option and get a personal license.
Now install the actual Unity Editor. Just go to the install sections, which will be empty for first-timers. Click on the Add option. Now, this is where it gets tricky!!
If you are part of an organization you will probably have an idea about what to choose. Most companies select LTS (Long Time Support) versions which are supported with the most trusted security patches only. To get all the new shenanigans and fun stuff to break your project, choose the latest version.
Unity releases updates in a really weird and frustrating way as you have to download and install it all for any updates. Talking about that we next have to select the modules we wanna add. So there it is another list:
A lot can be done with Unity. That includes writing code once for your game and releasing it on any of the above platforms from Android/iOS to tvOS, macOS, Windows whatever. So just select the ones you will need. By the way, WebGL is for HTML games.
If you look at the top there is a pre-selected option for installing Microsoft’s Visual Studio. That is so because Unity uses C# as the scripting language for all the coding stuff. You can still go with normal installation without this option but you will need to use some editor for writing the code, eg. JetBrains Rider or Visual Studio Code, or Mono Develop.
If you choose MS Visual Code installation
The installer will take you to install the Visual Studio 2019 Community version with necessary Unity requirements only (about 1.3 gigs). And just leave it to download in the background and let the progress bar roll.
That's all
So that was just a brief about game engines and installing Unity Hub and Editor on your system. Next, you can create a project with the version of Unity you installed with a choice of 2D or 3D project and with pre-supplied assets too.
