Back to Basics

The learning tool I’m going to be using for this blog is none other than THE book on Unity game development. Literally, the only book available for Unity development, Unity Game Development Essentials by Will Goldstone. It’s really a good resource and Will goes in depth into what does what, and why it does what it does.

I’ve already kind of fallen behind on this project, because as usual the second you want to try and do something real life steps in and you can’t get anything done. You should rest assured, here’s the first real entry on this blog!

Chapter 1: Welcome to the 3rd Dimension

Not any game development in this chapter, just a basic rundown on the interface as well as moving around/viewing things in the 3d space. Unity does things a little differently from something like Hammer or UEd and only gives you one viewing pane by default, although you can, of course, enable 2,3, or 4 of them if you would like. For the purposes of this very basic game only one window is really needed and moving around in the editor is as easy as playing a FPS so I won’t need the additional level of control provided by multiple viewing portals.

To the left of the screenshot you can see the game, a vast emptiness (for now) with nothing but a camera object in it. Without the camera you wouldn’t even be able to see the gray so that’s something at least.

In the middle you can see our hierarchy and project assets. These are very important in unity, as it is a highly art driven engine. Your hierarchy shows objects in the game world, your assets shows the assets (models, prefabs, sounds) that you can use. If you edit any of these the changes will immediately show up in any instances of the object in the game world.

On the right you can see the Inspector which acts as your liaison to properties of any object in the gameworld. You can edit model properties, change textures, write scripts, or just change how fast your character runs all through the inspector.

Stay tuned!