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Game Engines, Unity Hub, and the Editor Windows

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Imagine your class wants to make a simple game to show at the school arts festival: a student runs around collecting books before the bell rings. If you wrote it from scratch, you would have to program how to draw images on the screen dozens of times per second, read keyboard keys, calculate gravity, and play sounds yourself. That is a lot of work. This is where a game engine helps.

What is a game engine?

A game engine is software that already provides the common parts of a game, so you can focus on your game's rules and content. Unity is one of the most popular engines in the world, used for mobile, PC and console games and even VR applications. Important parts that Unity provides include:

  • Rendering: drawing sprites, text and effects on the screen.
  • Physics: gravity, collisions and bounces.
  • Input: reading the keyboard, mouse, touch and gamepads.
  • Audio: playing music and sound effects.
  • Build: turning your project into a game for Windows, Android or the browser (WebGL).

Unity Hub and the Unity Editor

Unity consists of two programs. Unity Hub is the launcher for installing Editor versions, managing licences, and creating and opening projects. The Unity Editor is where you actually build the game. Choose a version labelled LTS (Long Term Support), for example Unity 6 LTS, because it is the most stable and is supported for a long time. The Unity Personal licence is free for students and beginners.

The main Editor windows

  1. Hierarchy: a list of every object in the scene that is currently open.
  2. Scene view: the work canvas for arranging objects.
  3. Game view: the view from the camera, exactly what the player sees.
  4. Inspector: shows and changes the properties of the selected object.
  5. Project: all assets such as images, sounds and scripts, stored in the Assets folder.
  6. Console: messages, warnings and errors from scripts.

At the top there is a Play button. When you press it, Unity enters Play Mode and the game runs in the Game view. Remember this important rule: changes you make in the Inspector during Play Mode are lost when Play Mode stops. So stop Play Mode first before changing something permanently.

In this course you use Unity together with the C# language. What is new for you is how that code attaches to objects inside the game.