Setting up the project overview

- Let's start creating our game in Unity. I'll double click on the Unity icon and open up Unity. Unity opens up a project window where we can either choose an existing project or create a new one. Unity works in a project structure, which keeps everything relative, so we can move that project directory around as we need, set the project, and open up the Unity scenes. I'll click on New Project and create a new project for this exercise. In here, I'll click on the three dots in the location section and browse out to create my new project. I'll choose Exercise Files, Chapter 1, and click Select Folder.

Then, I'll name this project. I'll call mine 01_01. Unity looks for a blank folder to create a project in and we'll make a new folder with all the proper subfolders in it. We've got some other choices to make in here. We can choose either a 2D or 3D project. 3D is where we have a first or third person controller, for example, or a car, driving in 3D space. A 2D game is flat, only existing in X and Y, and is ideal for casual games, for example, or 2D games: side scrollers, puzzles, and so forth.

We can also bring in asset packages now or import them later. I'll click on Asset Packages and bring in a character. These packages are defaults that come with Unity, and they're various things we need in the course of making a game that are ready made so we can just drop them in as we need them, without having to recreate each time. I'll check Characters so I can bring in a first-person character controller. I'm going to leave the rest unchecked so I don't increase my project size unnecessarily. As we can see we have a lot of different choices: 2D and cameras, Platform input, Effects, Environment, Particles and so forth.

Lot's of different things that are very useful. I'll click Done, and now I'm ready to create my project. I can see here it's a 3D project with one incoming asset packages. Its name is 01_01 and I've set the location where I want it to be. I'll click Create and Unity will open up and make a project. Unity is opened up and we can see we're in our effectively blank project. There's a couple of things that come with it: a main camera and a directional light. Now we can see these by name in the hierarchy window.

We can also see them here in our scene, our main area where we'll make our game. Here's my camera and a directional light for the sun. I'll hold ALT and the left mouse button, click and drag around to pan and I can see a wrap-around sky and this is a default sky in here that helps contribute to the physically based lighting. Down in the project section I'll sort out my assets. And we can see already there's a couple of folders in here. Again, this is part of the relative project structure of Unity. There's an editor folder, where we can put additional tools we make or import, for example.

And standard assets. In here, in standard assets, we can see the characters we've imported. Here's Characters, and in there are other things, such as first person, physical materials, roller balls, and so on. And these came in with that asset package. I'll take a quick look at the project structure, and then we can get started configuring the character and seeing if there's anything else we need to bring in. I've opened up an explore and browsed into that 01_01 project I created. This is a project structure that Unity created for me when I made that project.

We'll spend a lot of time in the Assets folder, that's where we'll bring in models, textures, and scripts. In here, we can see folders that correspond to those in the project window in Unity for the assets we've brought in. There's Project Settings and we can configure these per project depending on the game we're making. Library is where we'll see different things that Unity will use. And these cover Editor Settings, Layout, and so forth. We'll also see in Temp storage of temporary files and other things Unity needs behind the scenes for working.

Most of our time will be spent in the Assets folder. Keep in mind again this is a relative project structure. What that means is we can take this project, 01_01, put it on any computer and open that project. As long as all those directories and files are there Unity will open up that project and find all the assets. Now that we've got this project made, we can start creating. We can bring in that first person character and see if there's any other assets we want to start out with. And then start bringing in our models and textures and putting our game together.