Learning Unity 2D

The most recommended starting point to getting familiar with Unity seemed to be the Unity Essentials tutorial from Unity. So, over the course of the next few days, I went through the tutorials. Several were in 3D, which isn’t really relevant to a 2D project, but it still helped learn navigation around the editor and some other basics like learning about prefabs, the hierarchy/project/inspector/scene, etc.

I was excited when I got to the 2D tutorial, but was actually kind of disappointed because it was so similar to the 3D one. That said, it’s probably beneficial that the 2D and 3D tools in Unity are so similar. Basically, Unity 2D seems to be 3D without a z-axis. Kinda neat when you think about it, as most everything else appears similar, though I am admittedly very, very, very new and there are probably larger differences that I don’t know of.

The real interesting part was the “Programming Essentials.” I don’t know C#, but I know Java, so picking that up will be a lot easier than other things. Interestingly, the tutorial wanted me to use Visual Studio, saying it should already be installed, but it wasn’t. Not only that, but the link they provided to install it didn’t work!

So, a quick Google pointed me to a reddit post where everyone basically says to use JetBrains Rider instead. Being a Java developer who used JetBrains IDEA already, this is great. Downloaded it (free version for now!), linked it up in Unity (this page was helpful), and was good to go. Amusingly, Rider seems to have some generative AI in it by default, so I was tab completing a lot of the stuff in the tutorial.

The most basic tutorials completed, a proper code editor installed, I was ready to start my project. Well, maybe not ready, but eager.