Unity 3D first experiences

This weekend I have started to learn Unity 3D. Picking unity as a thing to learn was nearly a necessity from my choice to purchase an Oculus rift DK2. While other things are supported, Unity seems to meet my need for other projects as well as a good way to learn game and immersive interaction design. So far I am glad that I finally took the plunge into Unity, even though I have toyed with the idea for a few years now. I think it is important to talk about what has changed in my perception and understanding, and why something like Unity is great.

I have wanted to get into game design and more complex visualizations for a while now, and I have had a number of fits and starts. The frameworks that I have looked at range from pygame, XNA, Play-CLJ (libgdx based), Panda3d, and also rolling my own in Java and C. While I would like to get back to a few of this, namely Play-clj and games in C for the XGameStation AVR system, I feel that the best chance of success at truly creating something is through Unity. The biggest factor so far has been the quality of the Unity tutorials. Making games is a complex task, where some of the truly interesting parts are not the programming. That is the biggest change in my thought process about writing games that has happened. The part that is most important isn't the how, but the what.

For a novice in games being able to experiment quickly with aspects outside of just writing code is critical. I feel as though Unity has the most seamless approach out of all of the things I have tried thus far. The languages that are immediately supported out of the box are not really interesting to me, they are familiar enough from other things I have done that I can focus on the interactions and environment.

So far I have spent time working with the roll-a-ball tutorial project as well as creating graphs using the built in particle system. I found this tutorial for creating visualizations, which is where using the particle system for graphs comes from. It is an interesting approach that to me was not immediately obvious.