How long did it take for you guys to walk on your own feet in Unity?

I previously learned in LUA and it took a few weeks to a few months to fully wrap my head around it. I'm a little intimidated by C# but it's a little bit similar. Eventually I aim to model, script, and design my own stuff in the engine and [I was wondering how long it took for you guys to get where you are to where you could freely maneuver through the engine?]

 

Freely do most things: six months, freely do most things without it looking like crap: a year and a 1/2

This is doing it just as a hobby though and not very many hours per week, it will definitely take time though.

 

I think we need a sticky on this stuff...

To answer the question you asked: About two work days. My team first learned Unity by doing an in-house game jam with it, and we had a small but complete game knocked together in short order. We weren't expert with the engine at that point, but we were already productive with it.

To put that into context we weren't learning game development as we went. We were already experienced developers who were just picking up a new tool.

- - -

To give you some advice arising from your question:

Programming, art/graphic design and interactive design are all their own distinct fields of study. You can pick up the basics of those in maybe a few weeks each, but becoming truly good at them will be years each.

Don't let that put you off making your own games, and even doing it on your own. Instead, figure out where your strengths and passion lies and take advantage of that. Really into coding? Cool, make games where you can buy existing art, commision art affordably, or get by with simple art. Is it the design side that turns you on? Great, try out some tools like PlayMaker, figure out their limits, and see what you can do there. Is it making things look gorgeous that gets you up in the morning? Maybe grab game templates (or, again, stuff like PLayMaker) and focus on simple games with sweet visuals.

It might not be obvious at first which field is your best fit, and some people fit more than one easily, so go ahead and try stuff and see where you find yourself wanting to spend more time or being particularly productive.

In any case you're going to want to learn a bit of each field, and in each case you can get huge mileage from just getting the basics right.

In the long term I highly recommend getting involved in team projects somehow. Note, though, long term. Teamwork is also a skill that needs to be developed in and of itself, and you want to have a reasonable foundation in your tech field of choice before you jump into that. But, once you do, you'll probably find an increase in both productivity and learning, because the shared experience of teamwork also means shared learning and more opportunities to learn.

Best of luck! And also, do come back here and ask questions. Ask lots of questions. There's a good link in my signature about how to do that effectively. The great thing about online communities like this one is that there's loads of people willing to share experience or who are learning similar things to you, and it's mutually beneficial to be involved.

 

I released my first dodgy web clone the same day I downloaded the engine. In fairness I already knew how to program from more a mundane day job. And I was familiar with another game engine.

It was probably about six months after that I released my first original game, Pond Wars.

So far I've not actually encountered any real difficulties in learning the engine. There is nothing I can't do, just stuff I haven't tried to do yet.

 

Well, I would say it took me about a week, I didn't consider myself an expert after a week, but I could get my way around and felt confident that I could produce a game from start to finish. However, I've been coding for 25+ years and I use 3D packages like Maya or Houdini at my job (and I've always been developing games as a hobby). But I love Unity and was really impressed by how easy it is to pick up and how well thought out the engine is. But after a year and a half using it, I still learn things every single day

 

Programming since 1978. Using C# since 2000. Hobbyist only. No worthwhile artistic talents. My only game dev experience was XNA which was a very different workflow. No prior experience with highly interactive editors like Unity.

I felt pretty comfortable after two weeks. Broad understanding (correct project structure, generally speaking) took about six months of experimentation. 18 months later, I wouldn't call myself an expert, but I'm definitely confident. When I do need to jump into something I haven't worked with yet (positional audio was a new one, recently), it now takes very little time or effort to get up to speed.

 

I found it took two weeks of working on a project. Keep in mind that before coming to unity I came from background where I was already working with ID tech 3, Unreal Engine 2 and Source engine. So already lots of game making experience.

I found it came easy, I already knew how to solve the type of problems games give you. So I just had to learn a new editor and how unity approach component design.

Also I just really love it, between C# as opposed to C++ and a great component system it was a easy leap.

 

I'm still not done learning to walk on my own feet, but I come from a distinctly not-technical background.

 

I have been playing in Unity for just under three months. Done a couple tutorials, expanded on them and made one horrible solo game based on them. I would say I am still riding around with the training wheels on. I'm probably not advancing as fast as some users, but probably quicker than some also. My life is so busy I am lucky if I can sneak 4 - 5 hours a week to work on it.

I started back in the 80's with Basic and building logic circuits on breadboards, Logic circuits was my favorite part. Then I did nothing with it for 20 years other than building level in the DOOM editor. Dabbled in C++ for a awhile about 10 years ago, but rage quit when I discovered C++ didn't even have a clear screen function (C'mon, even Basic has that). Played with LUA a couple years ago building a game mod. And here I am giving it another go in Unity. This time I think I will be able to stick to it longer because it's actually possible to make something decent without needing to know how to make your own engine.

edit> I also have about 3 - 4 years experience playing in Blender, so I understand that part pretty well going into it.

 

I tried Unity for 10 minutes, couldn't get a handle on it, and went elsewhere. Came back a year later after realising that what I wanted to do was not possible with the simpler tools. I guess it was about 6 months of working with Unity before I understood all the ins and outs of the areas I needed to get to grips with. This was coming from an IT/Server/CMS background with 30 years C experience.

Still learning now, it's never ending.

 

Same as this.

Seems like most here are coming from lots of previous programming or development experience and Unity was just the next step on the path. For myself, Unity was pretty much my first exposure to both game development and programming, so I've had to learn it all from scratch. That combined with the fact that I only do it off and on (I have less free time than I would like, and I have multiple other creative endeavors to take up my time as well) means that my current skill level is still pretty rudimentary.

 

My situation is very similar to that of @MV10. Learned programming back in 1995 (I was 12). Most of my time has been spent with BASIC and C variants but I have spent some time with Java. Eventually discovered C# during the .NET 2.0 days and picked it up within a week.

Just like C# wasn't my first programming language Unity wasn't my first game engine. After having spent some time trying to pick up UDK (Unreal 3) and generally hating it I discovered Unity's indie tier had gone from $400 to completely free and decided to give it a shot instead. It's design decisions really clicked for me and I became comfortable within a week or so.

 

If I remember correctly...

Code (csharp):

1. __asm {
2.    mov ax,0003h;
3.    int 10h;
4. }

 

You don't. That retrieves the cursor position and shape.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INT_10H

Setting the video mode will clear the screen. Scrolling the screen will effectively clear it too.

 

This makes me realize I would have literally killed for InterWebs reference material in my assembly days!

 

When I first touched Unity, I didn't know anything about game development and did not know how to code.
I used to watch some UnityScript tutorials on YouTube and gave up pretty quickly and tried my luck with 3D modeling.

The problem was, that the tutorials weren't satisfying enough for the usual (and often young) beginner's mistake: "Open Unity, go big and rock the world with your game". So naive.

I stopped "wasting" my time and got back to it a few years later when I had quite some experience with C++.
It then took only a few days to understand Unity, a few weeks to get completely familiar with C#.

 

Depends how much you use any given part of the engine. I didn't start writing shaders until long after I knew my way around the general API and the editor. I still haven't used a lot of mecanim since I don't even like the idea of wiring together 100 different animations and trying to blend them together properly.

The parts I know the best are the parts I've had to use over and over again. Whatever you use a lot, you will learn quickly.

 

three years and counting...

 

As many other have said, 6 months, for basics, while as a part time project.
But then its a constant learning process as you add new parts of Unity into your project.

When I learned Autocad, I could do actual work after several weeks.
But then you dont hit pro level drafting speeds until 6 months.

 

I usually work in Unity sitting on my butt, so I haven't tried working in it while walking on my feet