Day 4 — Setting up the 2.5D Galaxy Shooter project
Hey and welcome!
Now we get down to business, in this article I’ll be explaining how to set up a 2.5D project for Unity and how to go about changing the layout of the Unity editor to make it an easier work environment.
Downloading Unity and setting up the project
First step is the easy part and that’s to download Unity from it’s website her
https://unity3d.com/get-unity/download
Select the option on the right for the Unity hub which is a handy tool to manage your Unity versions and projects that you’re working on.
Follow through the setup wizard and once you’re able to launch Unity hub click on the installs section on the left and then click the blue add option in order to choose a version of Unity to install.
Once that’s finished downloading you’ll want to set up the project itself now by clicking the projects tab in Unity hub and then the blue new button and have your project set to the following so that it’s a 3D one:
Technically the game will be 2.5D then instead of 2D since we’re starting out creating a 3D project however the end product is designed to look as if it’s a 2D game.
If you don’t have a Unity account you’ll be prompted to sign in so make sure you create an account at unity.com in order to get underway with this.
A better layout
Before we start adding objects and scripts and all that fun stuff we’ll want to be changing the layout of the Unity editor which I was blown away by when I first discovered that it was something we can do as I found the default view to be a bit confusing.
As you can see above, changing each window in the editor is also pretty intuitive as it’s just a drag and drop system they have in place.
The above is the layout that we’re aiming for, a pretty handy one as it lets you watch how things look in your game in real time when you’re editing and adding objects to the scene view. To get this scene view click on the layout dropdown menu in the top right next to the layers one and choose the Tall option, this will line up most of the layout automatically for you. The only other thing you’ll need to do is to drag and drop the game view below the scene view and you’re all set with a professional looking layout.
Next up will be looking into setting up the player object for the game including movement.
