There are countless paths a college fresher can take to get into the video games industry, from simply being able to draw, to penning an intriguing story. But one of the best ways to get in is to master a game engine. And you can’t go wrong with Unity, a game engine developed by Unity Technologies in 2005. It can be used to create 2D and 3D games, as well as AR and VR games. It can be used to create games for multiple platforms like PlayStation 5, Xbox, iOS, Windows, and Android.
It’s free, till you’ve started earning a decent revenue. And it’s one of the most widely used game engines by developers today, particularly in the mobile and indie development circles.
But don’t let its ubiquity fool you either. It comes with a steep learning curve that newbies will have to steel themselves up for. But compared to other game engines, Unity is comparatively easier to get a grip on.
“Unity’s rich online learning resources along with assorted assets, plugins and utilities on the Unity Asset Store can assist with quickly putting together a prototype or a small game. Unity’s hardware requirements for a development PC are not demanding either,” says Ganesh Chaudhari, technical manager at Sumo India Studios, a UK-based game studio with offices in Pune and Bengaluru.
The Unity Asset Store also allows developers to share their creations with other developers. For example, you could go to the store to get a particular lighting effect for your game instead of programming it yourself.
Chaudhary says mastering Unity for professional game development requires being hands-on with its key features like gameplay, animation, physics, AI, UI and data persistence (a method for saving data from one session to another). “Following best practices in art, design and programming for creating and importing assets also help with optimised game development, particularly when a wider team is involved,” he said.
Sarvesh Navelkar, director of engineering at Zynga, says being strong in the fundamentals of computer science – data structures and algorithms – and understanding Unity scripting well would be a mandate for a fresher. “With this, a fresher can learn to build a simple game in a few weeks,” he said.
However, building production quality commercial games would mean a lot more, says Navelkar. “It will require understanding optimum build pipelines on various platforms, over-the-air strategies, performance profiling, and tricks to optimise for faster performance, strategies for serialising and securing player progress, techniques for building secure synchronous and asynchronous multiplayer experiences, realistic rendering pipelines and a lot more.”