Is Unity good for beginners? This is the question that we will answer in today’s video. We will discuss the very famous Unity game engine, and give you a detailed answer so that you can get an idea of whether it will be useful for you or not!
The idea of Unity at the start was to make something along the lines of Apple’s Final Cut. Final Cut provides amateur filmmakers with professional filmmaking tools at a reasonable price. So when Unity launched in 2005, it was providing the same support to game developers making Mac OS games. Since then, Unity has changed into a multi-platform game engine.
In mid-2008, when Apple launched the App Store, Unity was the first game engine to support the iPhone. It was then when a large number of people started using Unity. Therefore, the very idea from which the Unity game engine was conceived is what makes it unique.
is Unity Good for Beginners?
Unity is actually a simple engine to work with since you can get free assets, create objects, control UI easily, use premade inputs for your code, and so on, it’s also easy to learn and the pricing fits the needs of indie developers.
If you’re good at C# then you’ll find it so easy to build a game in unity because it’s the most used programming language in there, yet not the only one, Unity users can use C#, JavaScript, or Boo, which has a syntax similar to that of Python. The development environment runs on Mono, an open-source version of the .NET Framework, and Unity itself is written in C++.
Unity is a great platform for beginners who are not very technical and great as a start because it’s one of the best for creating small and mid-size games. If you are planning to create a big game then it is better to choose a more powerful engine like Unreal Engine as an example.
In addition to that, Unity goes out of its way to make the game-building process simple and hassle-free. It gives you a set of tools for common image processing tasks when importing new image assets. Also, Unity directly imports 3D modeling and animation files.
It also provides an easy animation controller that reduces the efforts needed for an important thing such as the animation.
One of the reasons why Unity is easier and good for beginners, especially those who don’t really know what they want, is because it gives the ability to create 2D or 3D games or a mix of both which is known as 2.5D games, and later you will get to choose what to stick with.
Besides that, Unity has great tutorials and guides for beginners since it is popular and because many game developers use it, and there are a lot of people to ask, also there are many resources that would boost beginners learning curve.
And if you want a place to start, Unity itself provides really good and professional tutorials. Overall, unity tutorials are beginner-friendly and there are a lot of them out there.
So, as a beginner, Unity can be one of your best options. But you can also consider Unreal engine or other game engines as a beginner. But there are additional reasons why Unity is a good game engine :
- Default project build speed for other engines is sometimes slow compared to Unity. Meaning, it takes much longer to fix your mistakes. It can take you minutes to package the quickstart mobile projects on a decent machine. In unity, it rarely takes over a few minutes.
- C# autocomplete and code suggestions (in visual studio) are better generally speaking for beginners than C++. This makes learning the game-engine API for the first time very easy.
- Everything, from building the project to opening the editor, takes less time using Unity. Other game engines have many types of actor classes, while Unity only has one.
So Unity is fairly easy to use, but the main thing to keep in mind is that it’s more like a canvas whereas other game engines are sometimes more like a template. Meaning in Unity you can more or less do whatever you want but the catch is that you have to do it yourself. So if you want to make a game you’ll have to learn how to program or team up with someone who already knows how.
Or you can get one of the visual scripting tools on the asset store if you want node-based programming. Likewise, if you want to make a game with really good graphics you can do so, even in Unity Free, you just need to be able to make the assets, textures, animations, etc.
Unity for Beginner Programmers:
Unity can not be good for beginners at video game development only, but it also can be a perfect tool for those who are beginners at coding, yet want to prove themselves in the video games industry, because it is possible to make a game with Unity with little coding required.
For example, Adventure Creator is the asset you need if you’re into making 2D, 2.5D or 3D games in Unity, no coding required.
It’s a visual scripting system and an intuitive Editor that enables beginners to build an entire game without writing a line of code and helps programmers plug-and-play their own functionality. Although, all Unity games require some programming at some point.
The only difference is the means of creating the game: visual scripting systems like Playmaker will let you create games without ‘code’ — but not without logic, variables, loops, and control flow, In other words, it’s programming for people who don’t like to type.
Unity Pricing
if a new developer wanted to create and publish a commercial game using the Unity game engine, they can use it for free but They will be charged a percentage of the revenue of the game that was made just like the Unreal engine does.
Since indie developers and especially beginners don’t have a big budget when starting off. This is undeniably the biggest solution to the problem of not having the budget to pay for software, but the free version of Unity does not support some of the features that can be found in the commercial or paid versions.
However, that could be fixed using third-party tools developed by Unity’s community. Since the engine is free it’s wide open and available to pretty much everyone, that also includes people who want to make a quick game to earn some cash or those who want to make a serious game and build a career out of it.
Game engines such as Unity are one of the reasons why people started to make their small projects that are not limited by big budgets of game development studios and titles that are worthy of bigger price tags.
In Unity, new developers can create quick video games in a matter of days, Thus there are more games developed by Unity than its competitors such as unreal engine, it’s worth noting that most of the games developed by Unity might be significantly smaller compared to games on other engines.
Let’s also step back and address something that we talked about earlier. There are a lot of people using Unity to make games to make some quick cash since unity is free and no one has to spend a penny on engine expenses.
Meaning they could develop a game that can be rather more clickbait than playable, yet charging customers quite a bit of money without in return losing anything because as we said there some games that are made only in a matter of days or weeks, the result was a torrent of poorly developed games being released through Unity.
And what do you think happened to Unity, the quality of games created on it started going downhill because it became the source of tons of poorly developed games, this resulted in a bad reputation for it since it seems the reason games with lower graphics can’t actually have higher graphics.
But in fact, Unity has always supported good graphics even though high-quality image assets and effects were not available for public use with the free version, you could still achieve some pretty cool visuals, especially using third party tools and assets that were similar to the image effects represented in the paid version of Unity.
Unity Free is free for any individual to use, regardless of income. It is also free for any company or entity to use as long as its annual turnover is less than $100K per year. If the turnover is more than the limit, they are required to purchase Unity Pro.
Unity is exceptionally simple and easy for beginners as a game engine, the other advanced game engines such as unreal engine are good for game developers who work on mid-sized games or AAA games. As such the licensing of Unity is more suitable and makes more financial sense to those who make less than 100k per year.
Actually, Epic Games announced that they will release unreal engine 5 that will be far more advanced than ever before and they will increase the yearly turnover limit to $1 million for those who will be required to pay, which to be honest seems like a great deal.