I have been starting out with Game Deveopment recently, specifically using Unity Game Engine. It’s been an interesting experience so far but also an overwhelming one. There are a lot of aspect in game development that trying to ship something quickly requires you to have a good focus in both the learning and working process. Below is the list of starting guidelines that I find could save you a lot of time but at the same time give you most benefit :
- Use tutorials and videos as your main learning tools. Unlike what I experienced with learning many development platform before, manual and documentation of Unity (version 4.5 as of this writing) does not give you much foundation to start being productive. Instead, their tutorials, videos and samples on the site are the most useful ones to get you started and learning the concept and practices. You can refer more to manual and documentation later on when you have more context and the relevance of it’s contents
- Read this two books : "Game Coding Complete” and “Game Engine Architecture”. It will give you valuable shortcut to game programming world that could probably take you months or even years figuring it our yourself from various sources. Surprisingly, it gives you more insights and contexts on why Unity do things the way it does compare to Unity-specific books. Also as an added bonus you get also the concepts of game development and engine in general too, not just Unity