Everyone gets their start somewhere. Tell us your story! How did you get your start in game dev and using Unity – and why? What made you decide to get into game development? Were there any particular resources or mentors that helped you out at the very beginning?
We’d love to get to know you all better.
(To see past discussions, go to the index thread.)
Always wanted to do game development but got distracted with general server side software development and business analytics tools. Last year around March I finally decided to use my spare time less on work related development and instead use it on game development.
Spent 9 months doing Unreal work becoming a source contributor and moderator.
In February of this year I decided that in order to be more knowledgable and well rounded it would be good to learn Unity as well.
That plus some good experiences at GDC further cemented my confidence that Unity is a product worth spending more time in.
As far as resources go the Unity course on Udemy by Ben Tristem has been a great way to boost out of the gate.
Started drawing as soon as I could hold a pencil, then upgraded to comics in my teens. Next step was to add moving images and sound - studying animation in Prague from 1997 to 2003 and creating short CGI animation films until 2016. So adding yet another dimension - interactivity - felt like the logical next step.
Although, the main impulse was far less noble - I was really disappointed by a game that came out in 2011 and thought to myself: “why don’t I just make my own game…” So, I downloaded Unity and fell in love. Having absolutely no prior programming experience made it quite a challenge… but I’m a stubborn guy 
: The man who made a video game inspired by escaping the secret police | Games | The Guardian
Welcome to Unity (and the Unity forums!). Did you attend GDC this year? I’d be curious to hear what those good experiences were, if you wouldn’t mind sharing them. =)
Wow, what a great story - Thanks for sharing it! It’s inspiring to hear how you kept going to get where you are now. Have you taught yourself programming now, or did you approach that obstacle in a different way? I recall reading that Guardian article before, actually! The article says you’re aiming for a demo in the summer. I’m looking forward to trying it out.
Twenty-five years ago, I wrote a horrible little DOS game called “Dopewars” where you travel around the DC area selling drugs.
Late last year, I started wondering how that game would look if I made it today. So I started playing with ideas and pulled out the Unreal engine and thought “this is the wrong tool for the job” so I spent a while poking around looking for something decent to use instead. Decided Unity was the right tool on the evening of January 1st, and picked it up a bit after midnight.
So I’ve a long, long history in development - less in games than I’d like, but I did do some time in Microsoft’s MED business unit - but Unity is still a new place for me to work. Less exciting than frustrating, because I’m old and think I already know how to do things. 
I enjoyed creating levels for half-life, quake and wolfenstein while in my early teenager years, never did anything good really but as said, I enjoyed it never the less. I later fell into conscription and after that began work as a construction worker so game dev related stuff kinda fell away, until I hit a major wall and got depressed. (Don’t worry not gonna make this into a sob-story, and I’m back in action now anyways! )
So, I was to fragile to go to work but still needed something to occupy my mind so I wouldn’t go completely nuts, I resumed level designing at first but soon felt I needed more of a challenge and delved into 3d modelling and coding that was completely new to me. A few months later I bumped into Unity through google, and that was that. (As far as I can recall atleast.)
Thanks Alice, yeah I’m working on the demo right now - and although progress is slow, it’s there, which kind of feels like a freaking miracle - every time. I’m sure many obsessed devs know that feeling :).
I’ve approached programming in a totally idiotic way, mostly “learning by doing”, which is very time-consuming because properly learning the basics of C# could have saved me a lot of time and unnecessary headaches. On the other hand it did force me to solve the challenges I was facing by elaborating simplified solutions and thinking out of the box. If a piece of software is flexible enough to allow this, that’s a huge plus.
I’ve always liked playing games. Space Invaders and PacMan took more of my money than I care to think about. I studied electronics in high school, really enjoyed building logic circuits. Boolean Algebra and truth tables and all that good stuff, though I doubt I could do any of it today.
Never had the desire work in the field though and after a 4 year tour in the Army I’ve spent the last 30 years in construction, primarily HVAC. But always like computers at a hobby level. Used to love playing in BASIC on my old Tandy 1000sx, then building levels for Doom. Tried C++ for a short while. Built a few mods for a game a couple years ago using LUA. Started trying to learn the Blender Game Engine and Python, but did not like that at all, even though I enjoy working in Blender.
So as of December, here I am in Unity and having a great time with what limited time I have to work on it.
In the spring of 2014, I was in Physical Chemistry in college. The professor who taught the class gave a lecture on cellular automata, for some unknown reason.
At the same time, I was reading Michael Crichton’s novel Prey, which examines agent-based computing and complexity, among other things.
Near the same time, I read about Bethesda’s “demonstrations” of Radiant AI for Oblivion.
With all of this…I was hooked. I was enamored. The concept of complexity, of emergence, of gestalt systems, of ultimately independent (agent-based) interaction grabbed ahold of me…and started gnawing away.
That spring I graduated, and moved on to a very boring job doing QA for an abrasives company. Between the “tedium” of the job and the newfound freedom outside of working hours (rather than constantly focusing on school), my mind was free to wander. And I kept getting pulled back to the topic which captured my attention…
Eventually I came up with my idea: real video game AI. Not Bethesda AI (which is some of the best in terms of agents, but is still incomplete), but actual agents that react to their environment and act on their environment…and each other.
I honestly could not say how I learned about Unity at the time. However, after I learned of it, it was really the only option–at the time, both Unreal and CryEngine required some type of payment. So I came here.
Today I’m working for that same professor, on cellular automata. And I’m still plugging away slowly at my idea. I don’t have too much to show for it yet (I mentioned a little in the previous weekly topic), but I can honestly say that I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere with it were it not for Unity–from the free software, to the incredibly valuable asset store, to the aid of the community here.
YOU MADE DOPE WARS?!!!
I freaking LOVED that game!!!
I often think about using its mechanics in games.
ANYWAY, yeah. I’ve always been a tinkerer and played with map tools and game making software. Name a game making sandbox and I’ve played with it. Click and Play, Gamemaker, RPG Maker, Fighter Maker, Basic Programming on the Atari 2600, World Craft, Hammer, Descent’s level editor, and a WHOLE lot of build engine stuff.
I never took to proper programming until Unity though. And I am a bit of an old man (for picking up programming at least) so my gaming days span from my Commodore 64 to today and hit everything in between, but mostly I prefer console because I’d rather be laid back on my couch next to my gorgeous wife than hunched over a desk.
Usually I’m struggling to find time to work on it given a very strenuous work schedule (I work overnights at Northwest Arkansas Children’s Shelter). And the game I’ve been working on (for an embarrassing amount of time) is Bravely Bear, a game that will raise money for the shelter where I work.
A school friend gave me a copy of The Games Factory by Clickteam when I was around 14 (21 years ago -eeek!) and I fell in love with game creating. Initially I just made a load of bad Mario clones and a game called Mokral about a blue, fluffy alien (which I had completely forgotten about until just now).
At that point I didn’t really have a clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life. I really wanted to be a singer / songwriter but I knew that was a precarious path that probably wouldn’t amount to much.
I have always had a natural talent for drawing and didn’t think I had the smarts (or patience) to be a programmer so after leaving school at 16, I went to art college and studied everything from graphic design to fashion with a bit of illustration, fine art and 3D (not Digital 3D - making things out of clay and metal in a crusty old workshop) thrown in for good measure.
I also did a bit of singing around local pubs and clubs with my uncle as part of the male vocal duo “second2none”. 
…
After college, I spent a summer working in Greece in the holiday village of Kardamena on the island of Kos. After a lot of fun and drunken revelry, I returned to the UK and landed a job in a local snooker club. After realizing it was a dead end job that was sapping my creativity and potential, I was fully planning to continue my education until I met my future wife…
Her dad was a self made man who had done pretty well for himself in sales and her brother had also made a lot of cash in recruitment. They both convinced me that art was not the way to go if I wanted to make a decent living and convinced me to embark on a career in recruitment…
To be continued…
Don’t be TOO excited - the original “Drug Wars,” set in New York City, was made by John Dell about ten years earlier and has spawned many, many clones. I don’t even think I was the only one set in the DC area. I did, however, make the only one I ever saw that looked like a clown threw up on your screen.
My dad and uncle were both kind of nerds, so they happened to have C64 and a PC with just DOS commands still around when I was little. I loved playing all those games, but especially a game called “Stonekeep” was a game that just stuck with me. I also got into contact with strategy games like Age of Empires and several very crude looking 3D games, which I loved so much for their non fix perspectives.
But at that point, I didn’t even know that it’s possible to make games, especially for me. It just was never a thought that I could learn programming.
Fast forward many years, I concentrated most of my life on trying to get somewhere with drawing. I just wanted to draw stuff and at the same time I was really into making up stories, making up “games” for friends, as in making up new games that could be played outside, just by making up rules XD and in general I loved switching mediums for my creative outlet…so at some point I noticed, that drawing alone wasn’t satisfying for me, but I kept going with it, until I hit barriers, made by other people, about “my art being too symbolic” for art university and practically making clear, that they won’t teach any traditional art (yeah my luck). But I wanted to draw people, animals, nature etc.
Then I ended up on a job college which I thought was oriented towards traditional drawing but they happened to change their “program” after I had already applied to it, to marketing based, to have a better foot in reality…>.>
Good thing about it was, that I found out, that what I would like to do is concept art, since I found out, that it’s one of the few art related jobs, that actually allow certain freedom for creativity, pay money and allow me to continue drawing characters and make up stories etc. for them.
And the school opened the option for university afterwards, so I found a university far away from home that actually had a study called “Games and Animation” at that point I had already tried to get into game making with rpgmaker, but it was feeling sort of restricted and I had the feeling I would need help for the technical parts.
I also lived with someone who more or less had promised me to do programming for me, if I want to make games, but he sadly deceived me 
So…and in that study we also had courses about 3D, which then made me very curious, cause that seemed to be what I liked so much about the games I had played (I was very into mmorpgs the first time I got into contact with internet, especially Asian MMORPGs :o ) and we had projects at university to make our own games, to actually get our hands dirty, so to say
And in one fateful Semester, my group decided to go for unity. It was a pleasant experience to say the least. We all learned very fast how to use the engine
Fast forward a little more to about 2 years ago. I wanted to give my game dev another proper kickstart, after I had to abandon 2 game projects I had worked on for a long time(in unreal).
So there was that point to decide for an engine and also a turning point that I decided to learn programming, because all the past collaborations were always being problematic from the programmers side (not working at all or neglecting to work as agreed on) and I was sick of programming being that ONLY wall that prevented me from making games all on my own, without needing to rely on anyone.
So, because I had such good experience with unity before from that study project and because it supported C#, which I thought is a good idea to learn, cause I already knew a little javascript and I considered C# as probably being the language that’s more often used in the future and also me not wanting to have to do anything anymore with “visual scripting” like I did in unreal (in a way it was a horrible experience after knowing how much simpler code can be)
and also that unity was a 3D engine and I very much wanted to make 3D games…I decided to go for unity and I have not regretted it ever since
I love that it works the way I think it should work
And now about 2 years after I started to get into programming and making 3 games for ludum dare and some personal prototypes and a blog to keep track of how my journey into game dev goes…I’m about to make my own company and started work on my first commercial project
(I hope it’s readable, I honestly had a bit difficulties trying to summarize it XD there is just too much that lead me to where I am now)
Developed interest in gaming server, and a friend recommended me out here. Still in the learning phase hope things open up step by step.
I got my start in 82 properly thanks to a friend loaning me her spectrum for the weekend. She was around my age and I learned how to program on it.
Regarding Unity, I wanted to make 3D mobile games. I could handle 3D on desktop platforms and ‘2D’ on mobile as it was emerging, but handling a cross-platform 3D engine was a step too far, one I felt a small developer had no real business handling.
I ended up still making ‘2D’ games on mobile after all.
(I really enjoyed your posts in the previous week’s topic too!) It’s so cool that you’ve managed to work on what energizes and excites you and I’m glad Unity was able to help in some small part In a quite flattering comparison (heh), your story made me think of that old story about Einstein and his boring patent office job which allowed him time to think about the work he’s most famous for today.
We each end up on such different paths to what we originally set out to do, don’t we? Life… But since you are here as part of the Unity community, I’m hoping that means you’re still feeding your inner artist/game creator in some fashion. Even if it’s not what you’re doing in your career, that’s perfectly A-OK.
What a great cause! Progress might be slow but it sounds like you have the determination to keep working on it, which is arguably what it all comes down to in the end.
I certainly am. I still have over a decade of my story to cover but am really busy working on several projects in Unity.
… Recruitment did not initially appeal to me but I was really interested in mobile phones so ended up landing a job at o2 in one of their stores. Over a few years I saw phones transform from simple Nokia 3310’s (crazy that they have just been re-released but old people really did love them) with black and white displays to symbian os devices with full colour screens and cameras. My very first touch device was an o2 xda and I loved it.
I really geeked out on technology at o2 and became the resident, unofficial tech support guy in our store. I witnessed the early days of the mobile web and the birth of WAP and GPRS (as well as crazy high data prices). I hate typical salesmen and never subscribed to the ‘sell, sell, sell!’ ethos. I sold customers their devices based on my in depth knowledge and usually ended up steering them towards devices that I loved. (Big chunky Nokia Symbian phones which actually had decent early apps and games) …
As I worked a lot of weekends, I had few days off mid-week (While my future wife was at her 9-5 Monday to Friday.) which enabled me to continue learning 3D modelling. I had started with Wings 3D back when I had the job in the snooker club and bought 3D World magazine religiously every month which gave me the opportunity to try out pro grade software, learn and have a dabble. I got a free version of Carrara 3D on a cover CD with one issue and I was hooked.
I can’t remember when I first found 3D Game Studio by Conitec. I think it was included as part of a ‘Learn Game Design and Programming’ pack from PC World a few years before but I am pretty sure I upgraded to the pro version around the same time I bought a pro version of Carrara 6 from ebay… (Sorry folks, this is turning into a bit of an essay - back to work for a bit… I will get to the point soon, I promise…)