Embark on Your Unity Journey

In this chapter, we will learn how to install Unity and create a project with Unity Hub, a tool that manages different Unity versions and projects, among other tasks. Unity Hub gives easy access to community blogs, forums, resources, and learning portals; it also manages your licenses and allows managing different installs and projects.

Specifically, we will examine the following topics in this chapter:

• Installing Unity
• Creating projects

Let’s start by talking about how to get Unity up and running. If you already know how to install Unity, feel free to skip ahead to Chapter 2, Crafting Scenes and Game Elements. If you are already familiar with Unity’s editor, you can jump to Chapter 3, From Blueprint to Reality: Building with Terrain and ProBuilder, where we start creating the book’s project.

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In this chapter, we will learn how to install Unity and create a project with Unity Hub, a tool that manages different Unity versions and projects, among other tasks. Unity Hub gives easy access to community blogs, forums, resources, and learning portals; it also manages your licenses and allows managing different installs and projects.Specifically, we will examine the following topics in this chapter:

• Installing Unity
• Creating projects

Let's start by talking about how to get Unity up and running. If you already know how to install Unity, feel free to skip ahead to Chapter 2, Editing Scenes and Game Objects. If you are already familiar with Unity's editor, you can jump to Chapter 3, Grayboxing with Terrain and ProBuilder, where we start creating the book's project.

Installing Unity

We'll begin with a simple but necessary first step: installing Unity. It seems like a straightforward first step, but we can discuss the proper ways to do this. In this section, we will be looking at the following concepts:

• Unity's technical requirements
• Unity versioning
• Installing Unity with Unity Hub

First, we will discuss what is necessary to run Unity on our computers.

Unity's technical requirements

To run the Unity 2023 editor, your computer will need to meet the requirements specified here: https://docs.unity.cn/ru/2021.1/Manual/system-requirements.html#editorHere is a summary of what's specified in the link:

• If you use Windows, you need Windows 10.7 version 1909 or greater, Windows 10, or Windows 11. Unity will run only on 64-bit versions of those systems; there is no 32-bit support unless you are willing to work with Unity versions before 2017.x, but that's outside the scope of this book.
• For Mac, you need Big Sur 11.0 to run Apple...

Creating projects

Now that we have Unity installed, we can start creating our game. To do so, we first need to create a project, which is basically a folder containing all the files that your game will be composed of. These files are called assets and there are different types of them, such as images, audio, 3D models, script files, and so on. In this section, we will see how to manage a project, addressing the following concepts:

• Creating a project
• Project structure

Let's learn first how to create a blank project to start developing our first project within the book.

Creating a project

As with Unity installations, we will use the Unity Hub to manage projects. We need to follow these next steps to create one:

1. Open Unity Hub and click on the Projects button, and then click on New project:

   

   Figure 1.17: Creating a new project in Unity Hub

2. Note that if you have more than one version of Unity installed through Unity Hub, you may need to select the appropriate version from the dropdown...