In this chapter, we will learn why Unity is a good game engine to start out with. There are lots of ways to begin a game development career, so choosing the proper tool to do so is a huge first step. Then, we will see how to install Unity and create a project with Unity Hub, a tool that manages different Unity installations and projects, helping us to deal with a whole host of them.

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

• Why use a game engine such as Unity?
• Installing Unity
• Creating projects

Let's start by talking about why you should choose Unity to start your game development career.

When you want to create a game, you have several ways to do so, each with their pros and cons. So, why choose Unity? In this section, we will discuss the reasons for this, providing an overview of the previous and the current industry state, and specifically seeing the following concepts:

• Past and present industry insight
• Game engines
• Positives of Unity

Past and present industry insight

At the beginning, users struggled with devices with limited resources but simple game designs. As the industry evolved, the hardware became more powerful and the games more complex than before. A big AAA game title requires almost 200 developers, working on different areas of the game. Each one of those roles requires years of experience, making games an expensive and risky task: you never know whether a game is going to be a success or a big waste of money. For these reasons, it was very difficult for a single person to make an entire game...

Okay; after all of that, you've decided to go with Unity—great decision! Now, where do we start? Let's start with a simple but necessary first step: installing Unity. It seems like a straightforward first step, but we can discuss a little bit about the proper ways to install it. In this section, we will be looking at the following concepts:

• Unity technical requirements
• Unity versions
• Installing Unity

To run Unity 2020, your computer will need to met the next requirements:

• If you use Windows, you need Windows 7 SP1 or higher, 8 or 10. Unity will run only on 64-bit versions of those systems; there is no 32-bit support.
• For Mac you need macOS High Sierra 10.13 or higher.
• For Linux you need exactly Ubuntu 16.04 or 18.04 or CentOS 7.
• Your CPU needs to support 64 bits and SSE2 (most CPUs support it).
• A graphics card with DirectX 10 support (most modern GPUs support it) on Windows, Metal support on Mac and Open...

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

Creating a project

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

1. Open Unity Hub and click on the Projects button, and then click on NEW, as illustrated in the following screenshot:

   Figure 2.12 – Creating a new project in Unity Hub

2. Pick the Universal Render Pipeline template, then a project name and a location, and hit Create. We will be creating a 3D game with simple graphics, prepared to run on every device Unity...

In this chapter, we discussed why Unity is a great tool for creating games, comparing it with other engines in the market. This analysis has the intention of helping you choose Unity as your first game development tool. After that, we also reviewed how to install and manage different Unity versions using Unity Hub, and, finally, we saw how to create and manage multiple projects with the same tool. We will use Unity Hub a lot, so it is important to know how to use it initially. Now, we are prepared to dive into the Unity Editor.

In the next chapter, we will start learning the basic Unity tools to author our first-level prototype.