*Your Unity version may differ from what is pictured. You MUST use the Unity version required by the instructor for your particular course semester.
Go to the website https://unity.com/download
To manage your Unity installation, we use an application called Unity Hub. Unity Hub manages your projects and available Unity versions, while providing other useful links.
Download Unity Hub for your operating system and follow your operating system's standard installation steps.
While Unity Hub downloads and installs, this would be a good time to create your free Unity account. A Unity account is required to access the services we will use during class.
Go to the website https://id.unity.com/account/new
Fill in the registration form.
Check your e-mail inbox in order to fully activate your account.
OPTIONAL: You can apply for a Unity Student plan to gain access to even more free resources which may help with your class collaborations. This process is free and managed by the GitHub Student Developer pack at the time of writing.
Use the following link to apply: https://unity.com/products/unity-student
Once you have Unity Hub installed, it will ask you to log in with the account you created in the prior step.
IMPORTANT: For now, skip automatically installing whatever version of Unity is offered to you. It might not match what we are using in class.
If you are asked to activate a machine license choose the personal/student license, whichever is appropriate to your situation.
Unity Hub is a launcher for managing your Unity projects and installed Unity Editor.
Unity Hub itself is not the Unity Editor. Because some video games can take years to produce, developers often need to install multiple versions of a video game engine for the various projects that pop up over the years. Navigate to the "Installs" section of Unity Hub to view the installed versions of the Unity Editor. (You will likely have no version installed yet.)
Click "Install Editor" in the corner to view the available versions of Unity and pick the appropriate one to install.
*Your Unity version may differ from what is pictured. You MUST use the Unity version required by the instructor for your particular course semester.
When you've chosen the correct version of Unity Editor to install, you will be offered a variety of optional modules to install with it.
At a minimum, you will need some sort of C# code editor. You may use whatever code editor you prefer. Visual Studio Community or JetBrains Rider are free code editors that work well with Unity. I do not recommend Visual Studio Code as Microsoft has documented that as a lite editor, Visual Studio Code will not reliably provide code completion or autocorrect.
Unity Hub can install Visual Studio for you, if that will be your code editor of choice.
We will also use WebGL build support to export and share games during the course.
From the Projects tab, you can use the "New project" button to create a new project. If you have installed multiple versions of Unity Editor, you will be able to select which version to use for your new project.
The requirements for this step are defined within our actual assignments. It is not necessary to do this step until you begin your exercises.