Unity: Intro

Unity is a game engine and editor used by small and big game developers, artists, and creative technologists.
Unity runs on both Mac and Windows and can build projects that run on most platforms.
You can make both 2D and 3D works with it, we’ll focus on 3D.
Unity is free for individuals, students and hobbyist but unlike p5, Twine or bitsy it is not open source. Unity Technologies is a for-profit corporation.

Setup

  1. Unity project can be big, if you are working in the lab get a good external drive with USB 3.0 like you did in EMS: the moving image
  2. If you are working on your computer download and install the personal version of Unity, the student license is not necessary
  3. You will have to install the Hub first, which is a launcher, log in with your “license”.
  4. Add an “install”. An install is just a version of Unity since you can have multiple versions on the same machine. Select the 2020 version, just mind that some tutorials may show slightly different interfaces from older versions.
  5. Create an empty 3D project
  6. Follow the intro tutorials below to familiarize with the interface
  7. You should download Visual Studio Community a free code editor even if we won’t do much scripting. Follow the instructions on this page, to make it work with Unity.
  8. You should download Blender, a free 3D modeling tool. We won’t cover 3D modeling in class but you can try to use it to convert and modify 3D assets found online.

Unity Overview

More intro tutorials

Official tutorial: Exploring the editor layout:
https://learn.unity.com/tutorial/exploring-the-editor-layout#

Alternative video tutorial

Getting Started

Download this package (the chicken museum) and import it by double clicking to make sure everything works.

 

Some games made with Unity

The list is endless, here’s a very incomplete one. Here’s some notable ones from the last 5 years: