You might think getting started with Unity would have been a cakewalk for a veteran programmer like me. But reality is never quite so simple and getting ramped up still took a long time. If you’ve been reading my emails, you know the tips I’ve given you really help.

Even 5 years in, I was still stumbling across engine features I had no idea existed (and nobody else I talked to seemed to know about them either).  The editor is a powerful thing, and there’s so much more under the hood than noticeable at first glance.

There are also plenty of people know the Unity basics, but really don’t quite get the code yet.  That’s not your fault..  c# is a huge language, probably the most complex one that exists.  Being giant, with a robust Base Class Library can be a huge benefit, but also a tough thing to learn.  What’s the right way to get stuff done?  Is there an easy way to find this specific object I need?  How do events work?  Should I use LINQ here?  These are all questions that need to be answered, and often the answer varies based on the use case.

Over the years, building dozens of Unity games for Mobile, PC, & VR, I’ve run into all these problems.  And spent a good part of my career finding the right answers.  Figuring out when Garbage Collection was going to be a problem, how to optimize the hell out of my graphics, learning when to use deferred vs forward rendering.

But optimization isn’t everything.  One of the most important things I’ve figured out is how to cleanly architect a Unity game.  How to make it easy to work in, extensible, and avoid the brittle messes of my early projects.

It wasn’t an easy journey either, I’d tried bringing in dependency injection, pulling over all the c# patterns I already knew, MVC, MVVM, and just about anything else you can think of.  Some of the patterns were a perfect fit while others turned out to be complete anti-patterns when applied to Unity.

We’ll start off by building an entire 2D game..  not a prototype, not a single level or part of a game, but a full game.. with multiple levels.  In this section, we’ll focus heavily on c# as it relates to Unity.  We’ll discuss things like garbage collection, optimization, physics, input, animation, object collection, gamestate, sprites, effectors, enemies, ai, level selection, transitions, scoring, powerups, & UI systems.

This first section is all about code.  Getting a good grasp on the fundamentals and quickly diving into the important Unity specifics.  We’ll work together and focus on code architecture & best practices for game development.   By the end of this section, you’ll know all about events, delegates, component based design, injection, monobehaviours, poco’s, interfaces, abstraction, and the BCL.

In section 2, we’ll make a big shift.  We’ll jump away from 2D and start fresh with a full on 3D game.  We’ll be shooting projectiles, battling enemies, picking up items, and building worlds.

3D development involves a lot.. we’ll learn how to setup characters and navigation, animate those characters, and get into combat.  We’ll also need to learn how to light a scene, setup materials, deal with character controls, particles, input, weapons, health, mana, spells, & of course some 3D UI’s.

And we’re not stopping there.  Once we’ve got a handle on 3D development, we’re moving on to section three.  Where we’re building a multiplayer game.  If you’ve got a few controllers laying around, you may want to grab them out for this part.

Throughout this process, we’ll be constantly profiling, learning to find bottlenecks, and discovering easy tricks to optimize out projects for the best FPS possible.

By the end of the course, you’ll be ready to build just about any kind of game.  You’ll have the skills to put together a full 2D game for a console, pc, or go straight to mobile.  And if you’re more interested in 3D, you’ll have the experience to build something for your favorite genre.  And most importantly, you’ll have experience completing projects and the knowledge of how to architect your game and make failure not an option.