Unity Newbie - Other Skills Needed?

For the longest time I wanted to be involved in creating video games, however growing up in a country that didn't really have an industry to speak of, I went into something completely different. Now in my early 30's, I'm really keen to pursue that childhood dream, and Unity seems like an ideal place to start.

I have beginner level knowledge of Object Oriented programming languages like Java (having picked up and gone through Head First Java last year) a smattering of C#, and during university some moons ago I completed courses in SQL, Delphi, and Visual Basic. So I'm not completely technically deficient here - in fact I pick up new concepts reasonable quickly.

I want to know from those more experienced than me in Unity development, if given the above experience and knowledge, it would be a worthwhile endeavor to dive into the Unity environment and tutorials now to build that first game, or if I'm going to find it challenging without first acquiring some other skillset, or a deeper/more advanced understanding of the areas I currently understand at a basic/intermediate level. Thoughts?

 

'Well I think there's two ways to approach this, you could specialize in one area, and work with a team. You could specialize in coding, modeling, texturing, Animation, level design, sound and music. But if you want to tackle a game by yourself, You definitely need a diverse set of skills. Unity uses it's own version of JavaScript, as well as C#, and Boo, so any programming knowledge you have will be a good head start. You definitely will want to know some image/texturing skills. Photoshop or Gimp(free), are a good place to start. Modeling and animation are other skills you may need, 3dsmax, and Blender(free) are good programs to learn. Sound and music are also a big part of games, if your a musician, your ahead of the game.(npi) But a sound editing program would be good, I usually use Audacity, it's simple, and free. Doing all these things yourself is labour intensive, but there are many great artists out there, and if you understand, 'creative commons', and copyright, this can help you complete your project, and the artists get exposure for their art. Usually it involves giving credit to the artist, most often in the game's credits.
As far as learning, this site is always a great source of help, the Unity manual, and api also. As well as their example tutorials which usually include a demo game, set up with assets so you can follow along, and see how everything is put together in Unity. I find a lot of good knowledge/tutorials on Youtube, and a web search including a "topic of interest", "Unity", and "tutorial" will usually find goal specific tutorials.
If you want to build video games, Unity is a great engine to use, it's powerful, diverse, and easy or hard as you want to make it. A simple game is quite an obtainable goal for a beginner, or you could make a complex FPS multiplayer game. The only limit really is your imagination. I would definitely recommend starting with a simple Unity example project, and follow along step by step. http://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/modules
Also check out this post for a detailed list of resources.http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/12321/how-can-i-start-learning-unity-fast-list-of-tutori.html

 

Don't let learning scare you!
You will be surprised how fast you can pick things up. You don't need as much coding knowledge as you probably think to get going with unity. All you're using the code for is scripting, which is fairly high level when it comes to the world of code. (Not that you can't go pretty deep in the rabbit hole, just saying things can stay very simple and you can still create awesome games)

As wizardious said, tutorials. Follow through what you feel comfortable with here on Unity's site (Over the past year their tutorials have become awesome in my opinion). Then follow through some of the live training recordings. Continue with youtube, google, etc....

You will find that tutorials bring a sense of accomplishment, and that from one tutorial you may come up with a game idea utilizing much of the code you've already written.

Start simple, finish something, rinse and repeat.


My suggestion is to come up with a simple 2D game idea, ignore gfx until you've created the gameplay you want, then throw on some pretty sprites and BAM! finished product.

Join the community and feel the love! That's something I ignored and now regret. Game on brother!

Cheers.