What Unity is Doing to Help Developers During the Covid-19 Outbreak

It is, undeniably, strange times, as we are thrust into a situation that is more akin to a horror video game than the real life that we know and love. It’ll only need someone to start yelling ‘zombies’ for the whole world to collapse around us.

Enforced isolation can be heaven for some but a nightmare for others. There are those who embrace it and fill their time with all the – internal – projects that they have looked forward to starting, but have never had the time; there are others who wonder how to fill their day. While binging box-sets may be one solution, it is the chance to actually do something worthwhile, and Unity has just the thing for you.

The Unity Game engine is a powerful platform that is ideal for users to create all manner of content, using a primary scripting API in C#. Unity is a powerful engine that allows specification of texture compression, mipmaps, and resolution settings for each platform that the game engine supports, and provides support for bump mapping, reflection mapping, parallax mapping, screen space ambient occlusion. So that makes it pretty comprehensive, and also something that takes a fair amount of learning to get up to speed on. Being in lock-down seems like the ideal time to get down and do some tutorials, but official Unity ones usually have a premium price to them…until now.

The Unity website is offering three months’ worth of premium access to its intensive Unity Learn platform to give learning resources to those new to Unity as well as those who want to learn a little bit more. These resources give developers cooped up at home during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic plenty of tutorials to sharpen their skills with, and all for free when you sign up!

The content starts at the absolute basics of Unity, with tutorials and exercises in basic gameplay and player control, together with some real-world programming that will produce simple to medium level games in no time. Once you are a bit more adept at the fundamental programming, you can get to grips with more complex subjects such as Getting Started with Addressables (which is going to last nearly an hour and half, even if you have a strong background in Unity) and The Maya to Unity Pipeline tutorial at a whopping four and half hours in length.

But not everything is that intense, and the list of easier, beginner, tutorials is impressive, and enough to make you want to dive in and get to expert level as quickly as you can.

It’s not going to be an easy time for the next few months, and we have no real clear sight as to when it is all likely to end, we all need something to take our minds off of it. Luckily, Unity are there to help and with the extensive list of free tutorials, you’ll be wanting the lock-down to go on for months, just so that you can finish them all!