Introduction to Unity

In this first lesson we're going to learn how to create new projects and scenes, as well as open existing projects and scenes inside of the Unity game engine. OK, so what I want to do first is just go over to file, and we're going to do New Project. And the reason that I'm doing this is it's possible that this is the first time that you've ever opened up the Unity game engine. And you get this project wizard that comes up, and you're not exactly sure what to do with it. Well, let's go ahead and talk about this. The first thing that you should see is the project location. And this is where your project is going to be saved. So what you could do is go ahead and just change the name here, and just keep it in the default location of your My Documents folder. Or you could go ahead and browse and put it in a specific place. So let's say you wanted to put it right on your desktop, you could do that. Now, the next thing that you have- and the most important thing you have-- inside of this wizard is the Packages section. Now, there are several packages that we could choose from. And for somebody who has never experienced Unity before may be tempted to go ahead and just check all of these boxes all the way down and just use every single packet because you're not sure of what it is. But we don't really need to do that because this is not the only place that you can get these packages. We can re-import these later on if we need to. Now, right off the bat, just to start this project, normally what I would do is just go ahead and actually check the character controller because that's what's going to allow me to add a player into our scene. And that way I can move around and play test it in our level as we build it. Now, a couple of other things that I could use inside of my engine right off the bat, I could go ahead and bring in my scripts or even bring in some terrain, if I wanted to do that. Now, like I said, all these packages, they all bring something different to the table. So if you know specifically what you're going to do in your project-- let's say you're going to do an outside project-- you probably want to go ahead and import those terrain assets. But we're not going to go through all of these right here, right now. We'll get more into these as we go along. We'll be importing more packages. So what I'm going to do is go ahead and actually just hit Create here. And once we create this, you're going to notice that Unity shuts down and restarts. And what you're going to see is a couple of windows that pop up saying importing assets, decompressing assets. And if you checked a lot of those packages, you're going to get a longer importing process, so it's going to take a little bit longer. Now what we're going to do is go ahead and close our Welcome to Unity here. And you'll notice that we have nothing in our scene. And our project view here has our project folders. Now, we're not going to get real in depth in just this lesson with the project folders and all that. But you can see here that this is where that one package that we checked has been imported into. Now, if you checked more, you should see some more folders in here. All right, so that's starting a new project. So let's go ahead and talk about starting a new scene. Well, at this point what we would do is actually go ahead and start inputting some assets that we've imported and start building our level. And then to actually create a new scene, all we really have to do is go to File and then Save Scene As. And that will allow you to actually save your scene. Now, with that said, let's go ahead and talk about how to actually open an existing project and open an existing scene. So let's go ahead and go to File, Open Project. And I'm going to go ahead and use my finished level that we've already created. And, again, it's going to restart and bring it back up, so let's close this here. And now you'll notice that our project's view here has several folders here, that we have all of our assets for our finished level. But one thing that you will notice is that there's no scene in here. Now there's a couple of ways that we can go ahead and load a scene. We can go to File, and we could do Open Scene and then choose it that way. Or we can simply double click on our Save Scene, which is always saved in our Project folder. So let's go ahead and double click on this. And you'll see that our scene loads up here. Now, one final thing that I want to talk to you about is actually the Product folder itself. Whenever we are creating our project and we're importing things into our Project folder, I want you to know that these objects that you're importing and everything that you're saving is actually being saved to a specific folder on your hard drive. So what I'm going to do is just going to bring in our folder here that we've got. And you can see that I have my animations. Let me move this to where we can see it a little bit better. And don't want to actually maximize it here. And you can see that we actually have animations, and that's here. We've got audio. Here's our DT finished scene file, and here it is right here. And you can see that all these folders are right here in this location that we've created here. That's where we actually started this project. So I do want you to know that these are actually living right on your hard drive. It's not like a project file like you would with another piece of software to where anything you do on that project is going to be saved, and you can make changes once you save that and all that. If you delete something out of this Project file, it's going to be gone forever. So I do want you to know that, and just be ready for that, whenever you're trying to clean up these files. So keep that in mind. So with that said, let's go ahead and just close this out here. And, with that, what we've done is we've taken a look at how we can create a brand new project, how we can open an existing project, as well as new scenes and existing scenes. So in our next lesson, what we're going to cover is actually the interface of Unity.