Unity3D, getting to know the tool

As most of you may know, Unity3D is a kind of "industry standard" game creation tool at the moment. I have the impression that it is versatile, reliable and generally works for people making games. And there seems to be very large and active user base for that.  But on the other hand it seems more complex to use than most of the 2D game creation tools I have tried so far. So there might be a little bit higher threshold for starting gamedev activities with Unity than with some simpler development platform.

However, My own experience on Unity3D is very limited: I have implemented just few demos for almost two years ago. At that time my gamedev efforts were just starting and I had no clear idea what I was doing. But somehow I managed to get something game-like up and running with Unity. :)

So far Stencyl has been my number one tool for developing games. All my released titles have been relatively small and simple, and the target platform has been flash (just to keep things simple). So from my point of view Stencyl has been useful tool for my purposes.

Currently I am exploring the possibilites of html5 based games, because I see them as a natural continuation for the flash. Also, there are several promising tools available for generating html5 games. But my longer-term plan is to take control over Unity3D, just at least to get an idea what large part of the gaming industry is using to create their games.

Using the tool fluently will certainly require a lot of learning, but I believe it is worth the effort. I already found very promising-looking set of Unity2D video tutorials from Youtube, so I probably start my exploration with these. After that I can probably try to get something small and simple working with Unity.

Edit 31th July 2014: Oh, just forgot to mention that couple of years ago I used Unity Training (Free) from Walker Boys Studio to get familiar with Unity3D. Worked at least for me. 

-Jussi

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