Unity 3D Tutorial: What we have Learned till now

We are almost finished with the beginning phase of this series. Let's have a quick review of what we have learned so far.

• We have learned how Unity works in general, how to import sprites and useful assets into our projects.
• We have learned how to add physics to our sprites so they interact with the game world properly.
• We have learned what colliders and collisions are in the game, and how we can use them.
• We have learned about instantiating, modifying and destroying gameObjects as we need to.
• We have learned how to add our own UI elements to the game, and how to add sound effects and music.

Of course, this is just scraping the tip of the iceberg in what you and Unity can do in your road to making awesome games. There's still far more to learn. But how, exactly?

How to Learn

So, what exactly do we mean by how to learn? Well, we mean to say how you should go about exploring your capabilities and how you can work with Unity. Like I've said, we've only just learned the basics of working with Unity. You will most likely be needing to learn additional stuff before you can make games ready to be published. Of course, learning doesn't necessarily mean acquiring knowledge about a new concept. It can also mean figuring out how to solve errors, how to make things work the way you want them to, and how to use features and assets in creative ways.

Let's say we wanted to learn how to add our own mouse cursor to our game. The most instant answer that you might think of is to Google it. However, there's an art to Googling as well. Have a look at the following images. Which one do you think will yield a satisfactory result to our question?

In our opinion, the second query seems a bit better. Making your questions clear and short is the key to having them answered quickly. Be sure to add in Unity in queries where it can be easy to mistake your question for another program or game development environment. (Like in the below Google search, no, not what we are looking for.)

The next thing we want to mention is the forums. Unity has a massive, thriving forum full of people with ideas, people who have far more experience, and people who are just beginning their journey of game development. Most of our personal curiosity was satisfied because somebody had already asked that question in the forums. Many old-time developers regret not having this level of community interaction when they were in the heights of their career, since back in the old days of game development, you were pretty much on your own. That's why you should make use of the community forums as much as possible.

Next, another great resource for learning new stuff is YouTube. A simple search will point you to almost everything you could ever want to know about, because the Unity community remains ever so highly active on the video-sharing platform as well.

Finally, we have Unity's official documentation. A series of extremely helpful articles and code examples covering all aspects of Unity's components and internal working, it's an excellent reference guide for when you can't wrap your head around something or need to figure out how code works. Unity's documentation is available both online and as a downloadable document. You will have the option of downloading the documentation when you install Unity, and you can also download it from here.