What Is Unity

What Is Unity?

Unity - Game Engine  is the best game development tool that has ever been made. Here's an in progress screen shot from my in development indie 2D puzzle game Burrow Blast in the default window setup. I'm afraid I can't show you the 3D work I do with Unity at my day job.

Unity is a powerful, full featured, commercial multi-platform 3D game development tool made by Unity Technologies. It has a free version for people to learn on and though it does have some features disabled, you can publish your games with it for free. There are many different pricing options to chose for Pro licensing, none of which require a royalty. For more information on that see https://store.unity3d.com/

Unity isn't just a code framework, it is also an advanced editing tool. The default screen layout presents you with a Scene View where you can manipulate everything in your level and a Game View that you can start at any time to test. Public variables are exposed inside the tool, so you can easily tune without diving into the code, even while the game is running. The Unity Editor is highly extensible with a fairly easy to learn interface for building custom tools in the editor.

Unity can be used to make anything for super simple 2d mobile games to next-gen AAA quality console action games. Nearly any video game design can be created in Unity given enough time, money, and work. It has advanced features like visually re-targetable state driven animation blend trees and advanced particle systems.

Unity is designed around a component model. Game objects are placed into the hierarchy of the scene and assembled from components including scripts, sprites, 3d models, particles, audio sources, 2d or 3d physics rigidbodies and colliders. This enables artists and designers to work hands on in the editor to do things like build levels without needing to program.

Unity itself runs on Windows and Mac. It can deploy games to Mac, Windows, Linux, Xbox, Playstation, and Wii consoles, iOS, Android, Windows 8 Phone, Blackberry, PSP Vita and their own Webplayer browser plugin.

The goal of Unity is to "democratize game development" and they have done an impressive job. The engine is powerful and flexible and while it's easy to get started with it has a great deal of depth. I have been using it for five years and I still learn a ton of new things every day.

One of the most important steps they have done to democratize development is build the Asset Store, a central marketplace for both free and paid content to use in your game build right into the tool. There you can find a diverse range of things including example projects built by Unity to help you learn, art assets like fully textured, rigged, and animated characters and monsters, plugins that provide advanced features, level builder packs, game starter kits for different genres, and even fully developed games for you to take apart and analyze. There are tons of great tutorials and assets available to help you get started.