Having fun with the Unity game engine

I have been missing for a while, but now I'm back with new material to write about. I finished the 2nd year of uni almost a month ago so now all I can do is wait for my internship which starts in about 3 weeks, so it's good that I stumbled upon Unity.

Unity is a really cool game engine which I wanted to learn a while ago, but had no time to do that. Less than two weeks ago I decided to go back to it and I started doing a  project tutorial that I found on unity's learning space (the tutorials area is really good). From the moment I began the tutorial I was hooked into it ... it was so amazing, waaaay better than playing an actual game. The Unity's editor is just perfect; you can see what you are modifying real-time, you can place objects in the world using a neat interface, you can write scripts to determine your objects' behaviour and modify your public variables directly from the editor, you can reference other objects just by dragging and dropping the object in the right space.

Unity has a good way of reducing the amount of code you write for your game. Don't get me wrong, I like coding a lot, but Unity feels like a breath of fresh air, you don't have to play-test every time you make a modification to an object's position for example, you can just see it in the editor from every angle. The learning curve of the editor is not steep at all. It feels natural to drag objects around, import new assets, add components to your objects, etc. Of course, there are some more complicated things but 99% you will find something about it on the Internet that will help you understand.

So as you have probably guessed I quite like using this engine. I can't remember finding something bad about it in the short time I've been using it, but probably that's bound to happen at some point because, come on, nothing is perfect. For a hobbyist like me, this is a perfect environment where I can have some fun building games. What I like most about it is that you can make a good looking simple game really fast. You can place lights, make some atmosphere with a bit of fog, add some ambient light so the shadows are not completely dark, add 3D sounds and put an audio listener to your character so you can hear the sounds from your character's perspective. These things are just so amazing for an amateur like me.

After finishing the first tutorial (which you can find here) I started another one but half-way through it I was like...meh! don't want to do tutorials anymore, time to do my own stuff. And that was a good decision because you learn faster by doing it on your own...well not completely on your own, I mean with your friend Mr. Google helping you out. I started working on a game called Nebulae which is a multiplayer 3rd person space simulator. As a beginner I think I progressed really fast with it because in less than a week I managed to implement quite a lot of features. The thing I am most proud of is that I managed to implement multiplayer as that was a first in my short game development journey.

Have a look at how Nebulae looks by watching the video below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFP8F5TpF2g

If you like developing games and you never tried Unity, I really recommend it so give it a shot, it's free!

I think I'm suffering from Unity hype right now *coughs*.