Unity Basics

In this tutorial, we are going to go though some of the basics in Unity. We will cover such things as what each window is used for, and how to move and edit gameobjects. We will also cover how to add a basic material to a gameobject.

Scene View:
The Scene View allows you to build your 3D world. You will place gameobjects in the Scene View to build up a "level" for your game. There are many ways to edit the gameobjects in the Game View. You can edit it through the Inspector, or by using the Move, Rotate, and Scale buttons above the Game View. You can move around the scene as well with those button.

Game View:
The Game View will show you what the game will look like when you play the game. You can press the play button to start your game and play it. You can also pause the game and stop it. One of the most common mistakes when creating a game is making edits in the inspector while the game is running. All of the edits you make in the inspector while the game is playing will not be saved if the game is playing. It does allow you to tinker with your settings with out the fear of over writing something, but keep in mind that if you like the new settings, then you will have to stop the game and reapply them.

Hierarchy:
The Hierarchy is a list of all of the gameobjects that you have in your current scene.

Project:
The Project window will give you a list of all of the assets that you currently have available for your game. If an asset in the Project window is never used in any of your scenes, it will not be compiled when you create your game. With that in mind, it can be great to have 2-3 different versions of some asset for testing, but I find that I generally want to clean up the unused assets in the Project Window before I finalize my game.

Inspector:
The Inspector give you access to all of the public properties of the currently selected gameobject and its components. It allows for quick editing of a gameobject with out the need to dig in to a script to change something.