Where to start with Unity

I am new to game programming. I created a game in RPG Game Maker and then realized you had to download additional game player to play it, who wants to do that? So after a few months of playing around with Unity, Unreal, Autodesk, and others, I feel Unity would be the best to start with.

I am running Unity 2017.1.0f3

My problem I am running into is that while looking at the tutorials, I can not seem to find the “Best” place to start with my creation. I can not spend money at the time, at least until I know this is it 100%, but just need someone to point me in the right direction for where to start until I make that first tutorial game. After that, I am and will be self taught.

Thank you very much in advance. Look forward to working with many of you and helping others out once I learn this system.

If you’re really new to Unity you should start on the learn page. It has the most important links on one page.

It’s difficult to suggest any explicit resource since it highly depends on your general knowledge. Are you generally familiar with “object composition” ( basically a component based system )? In that case you may just want to browse through the scripting documentation.

It’s essential to understand those general terms which you will came across in the IDE:

  • General: GameObject, Transform, Asset, Prefab, Serialization, Layer, Tag
  • Visual: Renderer, Camera, Light, ImageEffect, Terrain, RenderTexture
  • Physics: Rigidbody/Rigidbody2D, Collider/Collider2D, Joint, compound collider

Essential things you will come across during scripting / programming:

  • General: OOP, class. script / MonoBehaviour, Component, GetComponent,
  • Unity callbacks: Awake, Start, Update, LateUpdate, …
  • Physics: FixedUpdate, AddForce, OnCollsionEnter,

The overall structure of a Unity project is really simple. You will create one or more scenes / levels. A scene is just a collection of GameObjects. GameObjects are arranged in a hierarchical structur in a scene and each gameobject can hold multiple components to add “aspects” to the object. Any resource you copy into your project becomes an “asset”. Assets can be used / referenced from Components in scenes or from prefabs. Prefabs are assets that can be reused in several scenes or instantiated at runtime. They just represent a GameObject which is not part of a scene but a standalong asset that can be instantiated into a scene. They are just an organisatory feature of the editor.

When it comes to referencing assets or gameobjects from your scripts it’s essential to understand Unity’s serialization system and it’s limitations / gotchas.

You haven’t really said anything about your pre-knowledge. Do you have any experience in any programming language? If not it becomes quite demanding if you want to learn programming from scratch.

UnityAnswers is not ment to teach general programming. It’s ment for specific questions about the Unity game engine. I already moved your question into the Help Room as it’s not an appropriate question for the default space.

https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/projects/roll-ball-tutorial

Welcome to the community RPGFever!
You will find unity3d very interesting to pick. Did you download the Unity manual when installing the program? If yes, that’s cool. The manual will guide you to understand tutorials better.
I found a couple of good videos on youtube explaining the basics Here and Here