Weekly Topic Share your story: How you got started in Unity

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 : https://www.theguardian.com/technol...secret-police-communist-czechoslovakia-i1980s

 

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 ) 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...)

 

I'm actually still kind of learning the engine. I was hired here a year ago this week for non-technical support as my best friend also got a job here on the Documentation team. It's certainly a massive change from working in Insurance/Local Government!

So while I have been helping you lovely people out with your account/payment/license issues, I've been slowly learning my way through Unity via the tutorials on our website, socialising with Unity users on various IRC/Discord servers and getting involved with Game Jams. I've always been someone who was comfortable with the hardware side of things when it came to computers but I've struggled so much with programming but for the first time in my life, I feel like I am actually getting somewhere thanks to Unity.

I've recently taken on the courseware and something I want to achieve in 2017 is to pass the certification course and be a certified developer which I am currently doing in my free time.

So yeah, I didn't think I'd ever get into game development before I got this job but from the various teams I mingle with within Unity and from what I see you awesome people make, it's driven me to do this myself for my own personal gain and it's been so rewarding, so thank you to those who have helped me on my journey so far

 

Like @hippocoder I started programming in 82 on a Vic 20 thanks to Cassette 50 games by Cascade Games which was a bunch of pretty rubbish games mostly coded in Basic. Tweaking the code in these was my first taste of game programming and I ended up making my first game using what I'd learned from this.
I then got a speccy and wrote z80 by hand converting Assembly Language into machine code because I didnt have an Assembler.
By the time I'd left school I'd lost my passion (probably all that coding by numbers) but Amiga Format gave away Devpac assembler on one of their magazines and Scott Johnson from Bullfrog did a series of articles teaching 68k which got me back in to it.
It wasnt until 2004 that I decided to quit my programming (not games) job and make mobile games for a living and its been a struggle ever since Most of my income comes from contract work but I still kind of enjoy what I'm doing in a sadistic way and its a great feeling when you release a game of your own that you've worked hard to complete.

I came to Unity because mobiles were getting more and more powerful and I knew it wouldnt be long before they could handle pretty good 3d. I'd tested the water in 3.1 or 2 but I didnt enjoy the whole game object / component approach at the time but seeing the quality of Madfingers Samurai 2 made me give it another go and I've not written a line of Objective C since.

 

Growing up I always wanted to make games, but there wasn't much of an industry in Norway, nor any universities that offered game making studies. Looking for options, I went to uni for computer science.

During my bachelor's degree (5 or 6 years ago, I believe), a friend dragged me along to the Global Game Jam. We sat down with Unity for a couple of hours before we went so we wouldn't be completely lost. We got assigned on the same group as my now colleagues at Rain games. I liked them, they liked me, and I nagged them about a job until I got one three years ago. I've been sitting in the Unity editor daily since then.


Well, jeez, most people here got their start working on hardware that's older than me.

 

I got into games because, well, my artistic side had usually been satisfied with writing, but being a very visual person and realizing I didn't have to rely on my imagination, I thought it would be a good idea to make games that told stories or spoke of a different kind of reality. Homeworld 2 was the game that really made me think "OK I can't live without making something like this".

Funny thing is I always sort of disliked the idea of programming and never really wanted to try it, but when I had to do some matlab during my engineering course at university I became hooked. So the next year when I finished, I somehow managed to convince the company I had done work experience with, to give me a mostly unpaid project in image processing for a weed killer concept. I dove headfirst into C/C++ and OpenCV, which needless to say was a bit harsh but I survived, and a year or so later the project finished with moderate success, but received the management axe.

For various reasons I ended up living in Paraguay for a while at that point, and with the local wages so low I decided that then was as good a time as any to make games. So I looked around for the best game engine to start off with, which is pretty obviously Unity.

It's been about two and a half years since then, where I've tried to get up to speed with all aspects of game development, including modelling/texturing and even sound effects. For various reasons I lost a lot of time in that period without making too much progress, but I think things are back on track and I'm hoping to release my first game within a month or two

 

.... Phone shops don't pay particular well. I knew I was going to have to move jobs so we could start saving for our own place and build a life together.

I got a job at a company called Architect and Designer Recruitment as a Recruitment Consultant.

I hated it more than anything I had ever done. I spent the first three months wanting to quit every single day and I was so miserable that none of my friends or family wanted to be around me because I was always moaning. It was soul destroying, creativity crushing and I felt like I had made a massive mistake!...

 

Dude, you gotta edit that post - I was about to freak out in nerd fandom!

Dope Wars is beyond a game, it's like it's own genre.

In terms of modernizing - there was another ancient game called "Chaos Overlords" you might want to look at. Simple mechanics, and I could kinda imagine a hybrid of the two games being really fun.

 

I always waffle back and forth between being embarrassed that I'm not the original author, and proud that I'm likely to be the reason it exploded in popularity around 1993. Whereas you could download the earlier versions in binary playable format all over the place, my version could run as a BBS door and came with full public domain C source code, so clones rapidly started coming out of the woodwork. You can kind of draw the line based on whether the game names the police (Officer Hardass was removed in my version) or the loan shark (Vinnie had no name in earlier versions), but it's not strictly speaking definitive.

That colour scheme, though. Yeesh.

 

I always wanted to make video games. When I was little I used to make games on paper and imagining the interactions between objects.
Right after finishing high school (2006) I wanted to somehow start to make games... (I was doing HTML/PHP back then) but I didn't really knew how to start. I wanted to make "fullscreen" games. 2006-2009 was a bit weird technology wise... because "flash was dying", JavaScript wasn't ready, HTML5 wasn't ready, I even bought a FLEX book... hahahah...

Then between 2010-2011 I organized & live casted Starcraft 2 tournaments.
2012 was a bit off because I worked on my benchelor exam (a Tilt shift video in my town).
In 2013 I started to make videos about video games ... (WWW - YouTube)
2014...... I still wasn't making video games...
2015.... I still wasn't making video games...

Then I kind of had to get a real job and stop freelancing... so in August 2015 I went to an interview. I only opened Unity a couple of times. Had a test at a company... got hired... and now I'm working in Unity (and Unreal ) making VR visualisations and other small kind of games.

In the mean time I learned some more unreal, started using a lot of assets... started to work a lot with PlayMaker... and now I'm even doing a small APP that would play a 360 VR movie.

My spot is a little bit weird. I'm working a bit on being a "technical game designer". Right now I'm not a game designer, I'm not a programmer, and I'm not an artist. I'm right in between. I'm a bit more technical, I do implement scenarios, but whenever I need something more complex, I tell the programmer about a feature I need. If I need something on the art side, I tell the artist. So whenver someone asks me ... "What do I do?" I don't know what to answer. Maybe someone can help me out.

Right now I'm trying to learn a bit more programming... trying to implement stuff using PlayMaker ... and sometimes trying to implement stuff using FlowCanvas. I like the logical thinking... but I don't like writing code (used to like it). I find it way to slow.

It is also very hard to find a programmer to make a game. A programmer who is grounded and doens't want to make his own GTAV_MMO_RPG_FPS_THIRDPERSON_ONLINE_WEB game... I also don't know what to learn next exactly because... since I'm in the middle, I need to know stuff from both sides a bit.

So it's 2017... I'm kind of... making some games... even that they are not really 100% games, more like experiences...

In 2016 I managed to start doing a really small prototype. I had a GDD written in 2014 about a game I would like to make, and I started to try to make it in Unity using FlowCanvas. I did a small video here:

It was pretty enjoyable to make, but during that time... I only did "programming"... no designing so ... still. Then my father had a stroke and the whole 2016 was kind of "no mood to develop".

Now I'm trying to start to do some stuff again.

 

I was sitting in a bar with a friend talking about game development and we decided we were going to give it a shot. He told me about Unity and how he had read on some forums that the engine was friendly to newbies. I got home, downloaded it, realized I wasn't going to figure this out by myself and starting doing the tutorials in the learn section.

Honestly, I had no knowledge of programming at all, it was like a black box. I'm still a rookie, but I'm starting to learn design patterns, multiplayer architecture, and I got a whole lot better at writing manageable, clean code in general.

I can say that if the scripting section in learn didn't exist, possibly I would of gave up. Instead it fuelled me, gave me the basic understanding and allowed me to expand on it, so thanks Unity for that.

Of course, my friend never ended up starting, and every time we go for a beer, he tells me about how he's going to start soon, years later. But I never regretted downloading Unity, not even for a second.

 

Since I was little,
I wish to make a photorealistic Soaring Simulator
For people who love soaring.
So that you can soar and crash safety.

At twelve in the eighties, I learn programming.
But there was no game engine.

Twenty years later I build it in RAD AngelScript , UDK Unreal script and CryEngine.
5yr later I look into Unity 3 progress and I believe in it.

Using Unity as a tool for developing from scratch
the best 3D simulation that I can imagine with my hands.

So that old pilots can teach you how to fly properly
and I can fly with friends that live far far away.

Thanks Unity Engineers and you for reading.

[words inspired by hand made hero]

 

My dad did a lot of computer work growing up, and had a lot of books sitting around. I picked up some BASIC programming book at the age of 9, and asked if I could try to learn some. I did by starting on some text adventures, then tried drawing Mortal Kombats' Scorpion using just draw line to point commands.

From there, tech got better, was like 11 or 12,. I began 3d work and pixel art, by editing screenshots together to create my own moves in Fire Pro Wrestling X. Also dabbled in Quest 3d and was one of the first beta testers. Noted, I had been doing art since I was 2.

It was when I was 16 it took a back seat to music. I got very into music production after quitting my first serious band. This lasted until I was about 26.

Crohn's disease was something I was diagnosed with at 16, and it got much worse around The time I stopped trying to be a full time producer. I required surgery. Right before I knew that was needed, I started having symptoms of another stomach illness, that is not well known, and no cure. This put me out of work permanently, and I needed to start thinking of my future. How could I make the best of this. One day it clicked. I could use every skill I learned and become a game developer, like I wanted to do growing up. I've heard of Unity in passing while doing research, and downloaded shortly after using GameSalad. I saw it's limited use and had to switch to Unity and rewrite my first mobile game. Learned how programming worked from it though. Had 2 mobile games complete within 2 years, and now about 30% done with my first medium PC title. Spent 6-8 months learning modular programming, after years of spaghetti prototyping. Taking longer to get here, I have more bad health days than good, that hinders me.... But I'll never stop now, thanks to the support of family, and this awesome product called Unity.

 

got hired by a company that was moving from their own engine to Unity back in 2013. Had to learn the engine along with all of the existing employees, and I haven't looked back since!

 

It was near the end of 2013 and I had just came out of a few year break from game dev. Having last used C# & XNA. I looked around to see what my options were (mainly prompted because XNA had been dropped or was going to be dropped very soon not sure which now).

I had never heard or Unity. Never came across it before in all of my game dev searches and forum (others obviously not here) visits. Checked it out and it looked like it had the biggest thing I was looking for... longevity. Something that would likely be around for another decade at least. Sometimes I get tired of having to switch game apis / tech every few years. Wanted to find something dependable for the long haul (well as long as possible).

Also at that time I had been using OOD, OOP favoring composition over inheritance big time... for a long time so it seemed like a natural fit. In practice, I actually found it to be the weirdest thing I had ever used. But in fairness I think the bulk of that is because nearly every example I found was "dumbed down" to a very beginner skill level. So when I looked at that stuff I thought surely they are not advocating using this approach to build a real game? A bigger than the tiny example games?

I spent a lot of time wrestling with architecture in the beginning. Actually for a couple of years. Always trying new things to simplify everything. And ended up going with a completely procedural programming architecture even throwing out OOP (although still thinking in terms of OOD).

Finally I made a couple more games in Unity using my latest lean & mean architecture and it worked very well but seemed like I was using a commercial passenger jet for an rc controlled plane. Then I stumbled upon AGK. A very straightforward API with a BASIC language facilitating a purely procedurally programming approach to game dev. It also supports C++.

I stopped game dev again for the past several weeks. I stopped because I was just still burnt-out on game dev and have other things that are more important to me going on. My interest in Unity is mainly because I think I have explored procedural programming thoroughly again at this point. It has many benefits. But I find myself thinking about OOP. And interfaces. Even inheritance to a very tiny degree (I've pretty much always favored composition "has a" over inheritance "is a").

So that made me think about giving Unity another try. Of course, I could also use C++ with AGK but I have done so much development in C# and it really is a great language. I kind of miss not being able to develop in C#. It's just a very nice language to work with.

And sure I can easily write stuff at a lower level but I guess maybe having returned to that approach I may have more trust now that the engineers actually knew what they were doing when they added such features to C#. Maybe they actually implemented these things in a good way. I suppose I may be able to take a leap of faith trusting they did.

So now I guess my focus would be on creating an architecture to use Unity in an OOP way still quite different from all of the examples I have seen. I'd still want to avoid the Editor to a large degree. I'd still want to avoid all of the tight coupling Unity projects typically have as illustrated in the numerous examples here and elsewhere.

Well there it is. A long-winded account of how I first discovered Unity and why I may rediscover Unity.

 

Hi all,
I got into the game industry in the late 80's, and while i moved to other IT specialization very fast, i've always dreamed about getting back to my origins as developer

After checking some available options, IMHO Unity is probably the best choice for this, so here i am.

Regards,
JimboF

 

Back to when I was little. My brother bought a console. Black in color. Sega Genesis. My 1st console.
Later on we also bought a Super Famicom plus Disk System add-on and Sega Saturn.
I can't remember what is my 1st video game but the one leave me most impression is Super Mario.
There's a thought immediately coming out of my mind: I wish I could make levels for those games.
I drew a lots level concepts on paper and can only imagine the play-through since no software to build.
Ya. Since that time. I realized I'm already addicted to a category called level design / game design.

I also designed some simple board game while in primary school by using extra note books.
1 book for levels and another book for recording everyone process. Yup. I don't like study that time.
Always scolded by teachers but I don't care. My friends seems like my games and I passed all exams.

7 years ago I try to find an university / college to learn about game development.
Due to lacking of cash I chose a 1 year course to study on game art development including 2D to 3D.
I learned Photoshop and 3dsMax to draw concept art / 2D elements and 3D modeling / lighting.
I will quietly go to programming class and hope to able to learn something if my class was over earlier.
Also I learned Game Maker / RPG maker XP to make a game as final project then graduate.
Before leaving school. Lecturer introduces there's a new game engine and it's called Unity~!!

Ya. That day was my 1st day touching the Unity game engine and its version was 3.XX.
I remember I was playing around with the example FPS scene where there's a river and a bridge.
I get very interested on it and started to learn Unity myself since that day.
I know how to make 3D model and 2D arts already so I try to import them and play around the settings.
I tried to make a simple game but there's a problem: I totally don't know about programming. 0%.

I found an out-source company which ready to do one of the Super Mario title series game. (Art only)
Although it won't improve my programming skill but I'm pretty sure it will greatly improve my art skills.
Hence I decided to spent 2 years to join the team to complete this project and finally released.
I learned a lots of cheats / art technical stuffs in this development and still remember until now.
This is also my 1st time to know how things was imported from PC to one of the Nintendo device.

At the same time. I found a 2D game engine called Construct 2. It's focus on 2D game development.
The key reason I would like to try this is it use visual events. No programming skills are required.
Hence I keep a try on this and made some simple games and I did it in just 2 to 3 weeks. So happy.
I don't know if still can find my game online or not since it's several years ago.

Then I found Walker Boys Studio and learned some basic Unity Java Script programming there.
They have a Super Mario clone project to teach programming. Hey. That's exactly what's I'm looking for.
Things not going smoothly. I still encounter a lots problem on programming. So my project was on hold.

I changed to an in-house company which develop own IP. This time I can learn what I want. Great.
Unity now version 4.XX. I keep improving my Unity skill during this company and it's new features.
Meanwhile. I show my game to programmers and hope to let them teach me some programming advice.
After they know my story. They said if you want to really understand programming.
Don't use Unity Java Script but C# instead due to Unity JS has shortcuts which is not good.
They also shared with me the MSDN C# APIs to learn about foundation in case I don't know.
Really it turns out a brunch of errors when I converted my codes from Unity JS to C#.
Mostly because the "new" keyword and sometimes needed a temp. variable to do something.
Ya. Now I understand already. Finally.

2 years later. I left the company and try to do indie game development with friends until now.
I also do 3D assets for the Unity Asset Store to sell and I hope it can help some indies out there.
And Unity is now version 5.XX. From Beast to Enlighten. Time flies.

This is the whole story of my game development for now.
My goal for this year is to release a successful mobile game on either Google Play or iOS.
Thanks Unity making game development become more easier and developers' dream closer.
Keep it up. Always appreciated.

 

You know what I love about this thread?

So many people using Unity are such good storytellers. Which means their games are likely to tell good stories. And that's awesome.

 

I got into game development through the natural progression form D&D into indie dev.

Several (about 20) years later I started participating in modding in all the engines that supported it, Tribes, Unreal, Source, others I can't remember.

With an established family and career after leaving the armed forces, I knew my window to 'officially' join the game industry had closed because my more traditional lifestyle could not align with the tumultuous environment that the game industry offered.
Instead I went about creating a 'version' of the game industry around me. While participating in modding on my own time, I pitched a serious game initiative at the company I worked for and shockingly they granted us time/money to develop a prototype. I performed extensive research on all cots game engines at the time and we ended up choosing Unity. This was around version 2.6.
After that I started performing freelance animation work for the new batch of developers who were not just creating mods, but actual indie titles using Torque, Unity and Unreal engines.

I jumped back into Unity 100% around 2011-2012 when the 2D tools were released and have worked during off hours as a contract animator on various titles up until recently.

At the beginning of the year I began full (part-time) development on my own concepts in partnership with a close programmer colleague.

 

I used to be big into 3D modelling and aspired to be a character artist in my teens. Used Torque with some teams in the early 2000's. Had some prospects but life shoved me into reality and I ended up a car mechanic for a few years and the artist waned away.

With literally no education (1st grade) I started in 2010 and picked up Playmaker to tinker with as the urge to create stuff just would not die. After actually getting some things moving and making stuff happen I slowly learned the more common (seemed advanced at the time) aspects of game development.

I learned most of what I wanted to know by looking at other peoples questions, then finding the answers and giving them the solutions. I didn't really care about that issue, I just figured if they were asking then I would probably ask it too at some point so I might as well figure it out. Eventually eased into learning C# and that opened a whole new world of things.

At that point I was working as a drafter in O&G industry at a small company and had brought it into the 3d world and did some animations and rendering for mechanical / commercial concepts and stuff. During a slow period I made a proof of concept for some advanced pipe handling stuff done in Unity and realized that this was way more interesting than drafting.

Made Deftly somewhere in there in my free time, then got laid off for almost a year and eventually landed a job doing R&D with Unity full time making whatever the boss points me to do - including VR stuffs.

I doubt I would have done any of that if I hadn't bought Playmaker in 2010. It literally allowed me to grow at a digestible pace and still see good results.

 

Started building games in the early 80s on my vic20, and then various other computers. There really wasn't a clear path to doing it professionally, so pursued a career in art (and briefly theatrical makeup). While in art school, I worked as an industrial engineer, writing data collection and analytical software for real time simulation and flows. After school I jumped back and forth between graphic design (magazine/advertising) and enterprise portal/education software. The opportunity arose to combine both, writing educational games for math and science. (Including some games for NASA). That lead to working on some the earliest social web/games. And then into mobile, and other hardware platforms.

My engineering background is self taught (and trial by fire), I have always been an artist, and have education in commercial arts.

I worked a variety of small and large companies, including Garage Games, IAC, Playdom and LucasArts/Disney/DCPI and now THQ Nordic.

I got started with unity around 2011. I was at Disney, and we were doing mostly native and a couple of internal engines, and the upkeep was becoming a pain. Several of us started experimenting with (and advocating unity) as a solution. (As were some other teams as well). We launched our first game using unity (actually second one, the first never launched), and have continued to do so since. I still work with native and other engines to keep current, but it unity is my primary tool for work, and indie projects.

 

I guess my earliest introduction was with a second hand Spectrum 48k, which was sort of crap, and occasional use of my Uncle's Amstrad CPC464 (chukie egg, roland in the caves, fruit machine, harrier attack etc) which had a few fun-ish games on it. I then enjoyed the golden years of the Amiga platform, starting with an Amiga500 home computer around 1989, which I luckily became able to afford due to a required work placement thing in school, that I did for a few weeks and got paid for. At the time, there was the PC with early versions of Windows and VGA/SVGA graphics, but among 'home computers' the Amiga was the king. Also it had Deluxe Paint software which looked better than anything Atari was offering, which was the main competitor. Later I bought an Amiga1200 when my A500 died, and later upgraded it into a tower with various upgrades.

During that time I also bought a lot of Amiga magazines. There were several which came out monthly, and I had huge piles of them. I was pretty engrossed and very much the 'Amiga enthusiast'. Most mags with a coverdisk (floppy disk) with cool new stuff on it, some game demos and so on. Of course they focused a lot on games and seeing all the latest and greatest stuff was always inspiring. I wanted to learn how they worked. In those days there weren't that many 'software houses' making games so those that were had a heroic coolness about them. Sometimes magazines would feature interviews with them going in-depth in how their game engines worked etc which was fascinating. I remember some cool in-depth specials about games like First Samurai and various platform games. In terms of me actually starting to make my own, I think it all mainly stated with Amos Basic (later Amos Pro) which was dedicated to games. I did a lot of experiments and learning to program. Later I moved on to Blitz Basic, another game-focused language.

Somewhere in there the Amiga market died (again and again) and I immigrated and didn't do any development at all for five years, and then was forced to use a Mac. A new version of Blitz came out on the mac (BlitzMax), again game-focussed, so I got back into it. Stayed with Blitz for a while doing various experiments. Most of my efforts seemed to be dabbling with designs and starting things, but not finishing things, lol. I'm not sure I was ever really trying to make money, or at least wasn't going about it that way. At some point then, because I was on the Mac, Unity for Mac suddenly came out. Initially I did not like the look of it with all the windows and gadgets and clickyness etc. I tried it eventually. There was a bit of a steep learning curve, really, although it did seem to make a bunch of things easier at the same time as having to learn a new language and new interface and a huge library of functionality. Took a few years to get comfortable with it. Have had a love/hate relationship with it ever since. I still go back to Blitz occasionally just for quickness or to do little experiments, but anything actually 'game' oriented I do in Unity.

I still haven't really finished a game in Unity. My visions are usually too abstract or high-level that it makes it hard to implement, or requires a lot of custom technology. And doing it part time (read not much time at all) can make it too easy to lose motivation. But somehow I keep tinkering with it, going through breakups and getting back together, lol.

 

I found out about unity when it was fairly young, and had only been available to purchase for a while. Then, suddenly I saw an announcement that there was now a free edition of unity!

So I started tinkering.... ohhh this must have been 6 years ago at least, if not longer.

Then, as I was getting used to things, eventually they announced the free android and ios plugins. I went nuts, downloaded the add ons, and started going to town on making something I could actually release to google play! This was a very exciting time.

I created Asteroid Buster, my first ever fully completed game, which in essence was a knockoff asteroids

Later I screwed up my certificate, and had to re-upload the game, so it hasn't done so great due to losing the first 3k or so downloads and reviews when I had to recreate the listing (learned a lot from that!).

Then, unity announced the "everybody free for mobile" pricing changes... and I happily continued to use unity faithfully for a while, making silly app after silly app, hoping one would catch on sooner or later...

Eventually (after many.... MANY failures) I started getting decent download numbers across some of my apps, and started to actually make money from apps on google play.

I moved on to amazon, as well as the samsung store, and many third party app stores, in an effort to reach a wider audience.

Eventually I hit iOS as well, and ordered a unity plus subscription (the first time I ever started paying for this amazing software!) and got rid of the unity splash screen (which felt kind of.... not right? haha) and started making more professional looking apps and games. I rolled with the punches a while, and wrapped my head around lots of new concepts and ideas about game dev and software dev in general, and learned tons of C# as well as other languages, while creating projects that have taken me years (and are not done!) like Pixel Destruction.

I have learned that unity is a very versatile, very powerful engine, and compared to other engines I've used in the past, is often easier to learn, and faster to prototype, and more widely usable (on more platforms) than the others. This theme has continued ever since, and I'm very grateful to UT for that.

Many years later, I still use unity almost every day. I have completed well over 15 or so apps and games (although many had been removed from publication for poor performance ) and still love unity to death! I'll probably be using unity when I'm an old man, assuming were both still around haha.

EDIT: Also, wanted to thank the many people who were very influential and helpful when I first was learning unity! The list goes on, but to name a few who helped/taught/scolded me:
@Eric5h5 @mgear @JoeStrout @hippocoder @BoredMormon @Ryiah - Thanks to all these great individuals who are only a small portion of our awesome community!

 

Once upon a time, someone sent me an email saying that Unity is now free for mobile. The End.

 

I've always been a Gamer, but I never thought I'd have what it takes to make a game.

I completed my BSc. Computer Science: Software Development because of my curiosity and love for the field of computing. I was soon after working as a Software Developer for a company, and now currently a Software Development Lead at another.

2 years ago my family's house (where I lived) burnt down, and it forced me to buy a house of my own. For more than a year, I lived without TV, Internet or even furniture (besides a bed). I decided that I needed to find an alternative income. I started learning video game development by downloading tutorial videos at work during lunch, and watching them at home on my laptop.
I made my first 2 games, and since then I've been working on a bigger project, with a few other ideas in the pipeline as well.

If it's one thing for sure... having Unity definitely helped keep me occupied at a time when I really had nothing else.

 

I started out thinking I would go to university to be a Structural Engineer (I should probably note I'm in the UK?), changed my mind last minute to do Computer Science, no prior programming knowledge whatsoever! It was quite a leap, but a very enjoyable experience learning.

I started using Unity in my last year of university to do a physics simulation of the Titanic, back when 3.x was on it's first feet.

Got a job straight out of uni and relocated to work there, initially hired to investigate mobile development (something I had zero background in!), though that quickly changed to development of virtual reality work. This was at an E-learning company, which was at the time rather small, around 15 people, admin, sales and HR staff included.

As we hired more people and our offices got a little cramped we moved to a bigger place, where we are now, I now lead the team of developers using Unity to create tailored E-learning programs for clients, we have 10+ people developing in Unty and many more supporting from a 3D modelling aspect and UI development. 5 years on, we are now sitting at 70+ people involved in creating these programs for many different clients.

It's incredibly interesting work as we get to work in so many different industries and topics. Although turnaround times are very tight, it would be absolutely impossible without Unity as it is.

There is still a long way for Unity to go, it certainly causes enough exasperated sighs around the office, but it's a great engine that has been overall very good to work with. Hopefully it continues to improve.

 

I had my first taste of computers in 1982 when they brought a few into our math class for a few days to do a very basic introduction. The friend who I partnered with knew a little BASIC and wrote a little app for the next class. It would clear the screen and after a suitable delay print "Help, I'm being held captive in this computer". I watched him write the few lines of code and was completely taken in. I went to our public library and checked out a book on BASIC and taught myself.

I then immediately wrote my first game on paper. It was a text based dungeon crawler and the player had an inventory system and could move between rooms and fight random monsters. I don't recall how long I spent with it on paper but I remember running through the code in my head and "debugging" it. It was a couple of years before I had access to another computer and typed it all in. It worked surprisingly well but I never spent the time to perfect it.

That began my love affair with programming and making my own games. I bought an Atari 600XL later and spent much of my time writing code for it. Learned 6502 Assembler and "player-missile" graphics and display lists and all of those fun esoteric things that were Atari hardware. I was always working on some game project but never finished anything.

Then life has a way of distracting you with marriage and children and careers and all that. Years passed, then Microsoft's XNA happened. I finally managed to complete a couple of games and make a few dollars, then as Microsoft likes to do they abandoned a beautiful technology and moved on to other things.

That brings us to Unity - the only other decent game engine at the time that supported C#. I went through a few throwaway projects to learn the engine and now I'm working on "the big one". Unity isn't perfect, but it's so much better than writing huge amounts of boiler plate code just to get things up and running. You folks who started on Unity have no idea how good you have it.

 

This is really the most inspiring topic I've seen around here to date, I love all those stories!

Just two add my two silly cents, I got into GameDev from the back door, so to speak. I started working with 3D models for fun four years ago, but I never gave it a real shot. Two years ago at the University, I followed a "Virtual Environments" class with a major cultural-heritage expert from a private school, and it was a life changing experience. I had an internship at his department, my task was to create an online 3D tour of Grosseto city, in Italy, using all the material drawn by the students. After considering all the possible options, Unity seemed the most logical choice. It already had all the tools I needed, including the WebGL exporter, and it was easy and fast to learn. Once the project was done, I also worked six months on my dissertation using Unity, creating a procedural real-time building editor for a suite of tools that was supposed to help museum curators to create virtual museums.

After 18 months working with Unity, I now understand what Game Development really feels like. All my life I've been told "making games is not what you imagine it would be", and I disagree. Making games is hard, complex, unsatisfying 80% of the time, and hard to pursue for most of the time, but it's also challenging, stimulating and rewarding, which is exactly what can motivate me to wake up in the morning. Making games is nothing like playing them, but sometimes, it's even better.

 

@FreeFly90 you summed it up perfectly in your last paragraph - making games is hard, complex, unsatisfying 80% of the time, and is nothing like playing them. But sometimes the challenge is appealing.

 

<3! I have loved reading each and everyone one of these stories so far. We have another weekly topic this week but I hope people will keep adding to this thread.

 

For a short history of my start in the game dev industry (been at it over 20 years now), this interview with me on VPDaily pretty much covers it: Jenna Fearon Interview: Path of The Craft

How I got started with Unity: I was coming off of a project and ready to start a new one. I'd used the 3D Game Studio engine for our two previous games, and wanted to try something new, so...

I bought Quest 3D and did a really small project with it. It was a nice engine but not exactly what I was looking for. Next I bought a fledgling 3D engine which I can't recall the name of, and it too was lacking what I needed. Then I found Unity but it was only for Macs, so I waited a bit since they announced it would soon be released for Windows. Bought Unity Indie Version in 2009, and I've been happily using Unity ever since.