Re-starting Unity adventure

About two and a half years ago I sat down at my desk and determined to learn how to make video games.  I've been a gamer my whole life and been a "computer guy" for about that long.

I would say I succeeded in my goal of learning how games are made and how to make things myself.  I now have an decent sized library of mostly unfinished proofs of concept in various game engines, languages, and genres.

I even successfully participated in a game jam and my entry was fairly well received.

I was working with an engine called Stencyl which allows you create game logic from building blocks without having to type any code.  However I was running into engine bugs and limitations and found myself fighting the engine more than making my ideas a reality.


Very recently there was news that Unreal Engine 4 was going to be totally free (previously a subscription).  And now Unity 5 is going to include all of the "pro" features.  I wanted to learn a new engine (Unreal) but from the looks of it the Mac version is too bleeding edge and has stability issues.

So I'm going there and back again and going back to Unity.  The new Unity 2d tools seem to really make it possible to use it for every kind of game.  I'm comfortable enough with the C# language.

But this time I'm going to try to do it right.  Going through all of the available tutorials and documentation before jumping in with my own project.  Then I'm planning to make at least 10 classic games before creating anything original.

Here is my tentative list

1. pong
2. asteroids
3. space invaders
4. combat (tanks)
5. breakout
6. centipede
7. pac man
8. warlords
9. missile command
10. ??elevator action, frogger?

I'll see how long I can keep up writing about this based on my track record not very.

edit: read unity basics portion of unity manual http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/UnityBasics.html and experimented with interface, much improvement since Unity 3, reading time took ~1 hour with breaks and messing with the application