To start game development with Unity, you will need to install it first. You might be wondering if it’s free to try or free for a certain time period. The personal edition of Unity is free to use and you can even make money from it. The only limitation is that you can only use this edition if you earn or received funding less than $100,000 in the last 12 months. It also applies if you are employed or a freelancer providing Unity games for a company that has revenue or funding less than $100,000 in the last 12 months.
You can take a look at the plans and pricing at https://store.unity.com/ but for personal use, you can take a look at https://store.unity.com/#plans-individual instead:
Assuming you will be using Unity for personal use, you will need to get a Unity Id first. You may create one by going to the main website of Unity, click the profile icon and select Create a Unity ID:
On that link, you will need to fill up this form to create an ID:
The next step is to download Unity. The convenient solution is to download and Install Unity Hub which you can access from https://unity3d.com/get-unity/download website:
Once installed, run Unity Hub. You will not be able to use Unity without a license. To start using it with a license, click the Profile icon and select Sign in.
Fill the email and password and then click the Sign in button.
Once signed in, you need to click the gear icon on the upper-right to manage your preferences. There, you will be creating your new license. Choose to activate new license. Make sure to select Unity Personal in the license agreement and click Done to activate the license.
Once activated, it will be listed in the License Management section.
As you can see, the license is limited and will expire on the expiration date set. However, you can simply activate a new license before your license expires to keep on using Unity. After activating the license, go back to the main menu and click the Installs section. As you can see, we still need to install Unity as it not installed as of yet.
Click the add link to open the Add Unity Version dialog. Though Unity 2021 is available, I would suggest to use an LTS version first as major bugs have already been fixed in these versions. Once you’ve selected the Unity version you would like to install click the Next button.
The next step is to choose additional components and typically where you will deploy your Unity game: Android, IOS, tvOS, Linux, Mac, WebGL and Windows.
After clicking the Next button you may need to accept additional licenses. Once all of them are agreed upon, the download of Unity and its components will commence. You will just need to monitor the blue bar to monitor the progress of download and installing Unity.
Although sometimes installation via this setup can fail and if you retry you will need to start from the beginning. When that happens I go to Unity LTS releases page and choose to download Unity based on platform and not Unity Hub.
Once Unity is installed, on the main menu click the Projects section and then click the NEW button to add a new Project. There are several templates to choose from when making a game but for now we will choose 3D and click the CREATE button. Don’t worry about this being a make or break choice because it’s not difficult to switch to 2D, HDRP or URP within an existing project.
After clicking the CREATE button, the project will be prepared and Unity’s main window will appear!
Now, you can get started with using Unity! It’s time to create some games!
