Guidance required to Start my first project as 2D Game development in Unity.

Questions & Answers
1

Hi members,

Im new to this forum and Unity 3D both. I have some background of C# and Java. I started learning Unity 2 months back and doing my tutorial on basic 2D game development.

My plan is to create basic ABC learning 2D game for kids for android users as a solo game creator. Not sure i might expand my work based on my competence on Unity in future. However, my present object is to create the simple ABC learning 2D game for kids. I have following questions in mind:-

  1. Is Unity a good choice for me?
  2. How long will it take to create the game with some background in programming?
  3. I m currently doing another job unrelated to programming and give 2 to 3 hours a day only to this project.
  4. Do i also need to learn Graphics designing? I don’t currently have any Graphics experience or I can get all the required Graphics from Unity store for my project?
  5. Will this Unity forum be sufficient for me for this simple project or do i need to be active on stackoverflow and github communities, i m not the member of either on?
  6. I need tangible answer in terms of time and effort although i understand it will a tricky one to answer discretely.

Grateful to the community in advance

3

Hi there!

  1. Is Unity a good choice? Perhaps I’m not the best person to answer this question since I love Unity and haven’t used too many other game engines, but Unity can totally handle this type of project. It has great tools for 2D projects and its ability to export to many types of platforms should make Android build not too bad.
  2. This is kind of hard to answer. I don’t quite know what your skill level in programming is (or what “some background” means, but I’m sure you’ve heard that Unity is quite an easy game engine to work with. And it is. There are many great tutorials that are pretty straight forward and easy to follow. You knowing C# though is good, that’ll help quite a bit. I don’t think it would take very long to get the hand of it and use it for a simple 2D game like that. A month maybe?
  3. My answer above goes with this one. Sacrifice them sleeps for more time! :smiley:
  4. Well, pretty much every game ever has some type of art and graphics in it. Unless you are planning for a text-based game, you’ll probably want something. There are many things available in the asset store, but since I don’t quite know what you want your project to look like, I can’t point you to many things. Unity’s ability to add sprites/text/and general UI to a project though is great and super easy to do, so that’s a plus.
  5. Again, I’m probably not the best person for this question, since I don’t do a whole lot of posting, but I’d be willing to bet that this Unity Answers place would be good enough for quick questions and direction if you get stuck.
  6. Yeah, I’d say a month is a decent time estimate? Like I said, I don’t know exactly what your game is going to involve, but a month is feeling pretty reasonable to me. Time to go through basic tutorials, putting it all together, then learning how to put it on mobile and such. I was learning how to code in Unity back when I hardly knew anything about programming. I didn’t even know what a for loop was at the time, so I can’t quite use my experience to guess how long it’ll take to learn Unity, but if you have a solid foundation already, it probably won’t be all that bad.

Hopefully I said a couple useful words in there. Best of luck!

2

Like you, I have a background in software development, though my preferred language (by far ) is C++, and I’ve been at this for over 30 years (before C++ existed).

Unity is an excellent choice. I say that with some disagreement with C# as a language choice, but my complaint in that regard is minor considering the results.

Having a C# background is a definite plus. Student otherwise learning everything all at once tend to get the notion that scripts are a programming concept (they’re just the text files in a solution, really), so they tend to think in terms of scripts instead of classes, and so limit their thinking. You’ll have the opposite problem, which is better. You’ll think, as do I, in terms of developing an application, where C# is fully available in the context of using Unity classes.

I’d suggest you get Blender, a 3D modeling tool. If you or a family member is in high school or college, you can get a 3 year license of AutoDesk products, so 3DS Max and Maya are excellent options. They are not intended for Unity, they work to create models Unity can import. You can start without these tools, if your graphics are limited to boxes, spheres and other built in Unity shapes.

You may also want for Photoshop, but there’s a free open source tool called Gimp that might suffice. This is used to edit photos used as textures.

There are, of course, assets you can purchase in the store.

You might need a few months to learn and develop at the same time. I can’t say easily, because a lot is up to how fascination leads to diversion and expansion of your design goals.

Google, Unity forums, Unity answers combined are likely most of what you’ll need, along with the many free tutorials, some on YouTube. You may not need to purchase study materials, and I have no experience with any of them. I come from experience in a number of fields, film and television post production among them. Our mileage will vary a lot.

I can attest, though, that among the engines you might find, Unity will offer about the fastest zero to functional state of all of them. I’ll avoid specific names here, but Unity is remarkably good at that balance between ease of use, results and target hardware variety.

You didn’t mention sound. Don’t forget sound. Sound effects, maybe music, etc. Sound is an easily overlooked dimension for a student coming on board. I have a midi keyboard, music workstation, etc. That may not be necessary, but if you’re not musically trained, you might want to find a friend that plays keyboards.

As to sound effects, there’s an anecdote that’s quite informative. Use your imagination. It is a fact that the original Star Wars sound for shooting those laser weapons was created by attaching a microphone on a guide wire holding up a telephone pole and striking the pole with a metal object.

You would not believe what artists who specialize in this art do to get sound effects. You can do a lot with just simple beeps, blips and such, all created on a synth.