Day 1: A Brief Introduction to Unity

Risk of Rain 2 is my favorite game of 2020, and it was made using the Unity engine.

I’m very lucky that I came of age in a time where game development is easier than ever before. It’s so easy that by the time you are done reading this article, you will have the means to start creating your own video game!

The secret is the Unity engine. As evidenced by many showcase videos on the GameDevHQ Youtube channel, Unity is capable of making all kinds of games and simulations. It’s a development tool so powerful and feature rich that it seems impossible that you can just sign up and get it for free. Yet, somehow, you can do just that.

Head over to their download page, make an account, and download Unity Hub.

Once we’ve launched Unity Hub, we’ll have to install a version of Unity and Visual Studio so you can make projects and write code. Once we’ve done that, we’ll see a screen like below

Time to make a new project!

I’ve selected 2D as my project type, made a name for my project, and set the location to be a new folder created within the Documents folder on my PC. Then just click create.

And so it begins.

Here’s a new empty project. Before we start doing anything with it, we are going to need to make sure that our progress is saved in a secure location, to ensure we don’t lose hundreds of hours of progress if something terrible happens to the hard drive. Tomorrow we’ll be looking at version control, and how to make sure this project is nice and safe as we add features to it.