Difficulty To Learn

[Xaos]

How hard is Unity to learn? I want somewhere between completely coding the game myself and drag-and-drop (large area, I know). I want to feel like I'm making the game, but not be overwhelmed by how advanced/complex it is. How difficult is it to get to this step in Unity?

[Jackolantern]

Coding 3D games from scratch without an engine is extremely rough. If you just start with DirectX or OpenGL, you can expect to be working on just the plumbing (or engine) of your game for possibly a year or longer to get results even close to modern games, and it requires a pretty extreme knowledge of rendering.

While some professional game studios still make their own 3D game engines for their products, that requires a large team and a long period of time. Most professional studios today simply license an engine (or use one of their previous in-house engines) to create their game, where the bulk of the development will look just like Unity development: lots and lots of scripting. Modern 3D games have just become far too complex and the requirements are just too high to start from scratch with DirectX or OpenGL for every new game. We would probably have about 25% as many games as we have coming out today if everyone did.

I don't think you have to worry about not feeling like you are making the game lol. There is tons of coding work to be done to make a game with Unity 3D.

[Xaos]

So Unity basically uses a "slang" version of Javascript right? I see there are alot of tutorials atleast to get started on Unity, are they good? I assume so. Also, is there like a huge resource to get free 3D models or something? Because I feel that is also a HUGE obstacle.

[Jackolantern]

The only part I can really answer is the first question: It is basically standard ECMAscript (the standard that JS is based on) with a fairly large API to handle the engine-specific stuff.

For the other stuff, I am not sure, as I don't use Unity nor do any 3D game development.

[hallsofvallhalla]

Unity is very easy to learn and the scripting language is very simple until you get into the networking and dealing with variables across multiple scripts. I originally used javascript but moved to C# and Javascript for the scripting.

[Jackolantern]

That is true, you can also use C#, and oddly enough, I know at one point they even supported Boo, a .NET Python implementation (although I am not quite sure why they didn't choose to support the much more popular .NET Python implementation, IronPython). But nearly all development with Unity is done with either JS or C#. Between the 2 I am not sure which is the most popular, but if I had to hazard a guess, I would think JS.

[Xaos]

I don't know much C#......infact, none at all I assume JS can do everything C# can do in terms of unity development?

[Jackolantern]

As far as I know, that is correct

[hallsofvallhalla]

Yep, and quite a few of the examples and tutorials use JS.

[OldRod]

Want to learn Unity and C# while working on an RPG-type game?

Check out http://www.burgzergarcade.com/hack-slas ... e-tutorial

285 video tutorial series. Could have been better and he restarts a couple of times to do things differently, but there's a lot of good stuff in here.

He started to do this series again from scratch in Unity 4, but haven't seen any of those videos yet.