Installing Unity & Getting Started with Game Development

Installing Unity

• Go to Unity webpage
• Create a Unity ID or Sign in
• Click on Get started button
• Select the Individual/Personal plan
  Note: if you are a student enrolled in an accredited educational institution, you can apply to Individual/Student plan. More info here
• Install Unity Hub

Unity Hub

Unity Hub is a standalone application that streamlines the way you find, download, and manage your Unity projects and installations. At top right there is an icon to sign in with you Unity account.

Unity Hub is divided into 4 sections:

• Projects: shows opened projects
• Learn: projects and tutorials for learning Unity
• Community: Unity communities
• Installs: Unity instances installed on the computer. Each instance belongs to a version. For getting a new instance click on add button.

Unity has official releases with improvements in workflow and performance.

LTS (Long Term Service) stream offers a stable version of Unity for those who want to lock in their productions on a specific version of Unity for maximum stability. This kind of release doesn’t have any new features, API changes or enhancements, but updates and fixes.

As Unity is a cross-platform development engine, when installing a new Unity instance, you can select which modules you want to add.

After installation, you can now begin to use Unity for game development or others like Architecture, Media, Cinematography and Automotive. For more info, click here to visit Unity webpage.

Open/Create new project

To open a project from the list, simply click on it.

Add: add an existing project to Unity Hub’s list.

New: create a new project selecting an installed version

Unity Editor’s interface

• Toolbar: provides access to the most essential working features
• Scene view: where you place everything you need for building your application
• Game view: where everything is rendered, how the product will look and feel
• Hierarchy view: list of all items you have in the scene
• Inspector view: detailed info about the object selected in hierarchy
• Project view: assets available to make up the application

For detailed info, click here

Gameobjects

GameObjects are the fundamental objects in Unity that represent characters, props and scenery. For more info, click here

They are listed in hierarchy and modified in scene or inspector view

To create a Gameobject, for example a cube, you can:

• Go to menu bar
• Right click on hierarchy

And select GameObject/3D Object/Cube

Modifying GameObjects

To modify settings in a GameObject like position, rotation or scaling, we use thesed options available in the toolbar. The Rect Tool is used mostly in 2D.

For more info, click here

Applying materials

Materials define how an object looks in the game.
To create a new Material, from main menu go to Assets->Create->Material or from the Project View using the context menu (right click).

More info: Creating and Using materials