Unity Reference

Prairie is a selection of pre-made Unity scripts and assets to be used inside of the Unity editor workflow. As such, using Prairie requires a basic working knowledge of the Unity editor (don’t worry — no coding experience is required).

Getting Started with Unity Tutorials

The following set of videos (each a digestible 3 minutes or so) will provide you with a good sense of the editor, scene view, and key concepts moving forward, (without any coding):

• Interface Overview
• Editing Elements in the Scene View
• Editing Properties in The Inspector
• Building Blocks: Game Objects and Components
• Prefabs: Reusable Elements

Key Terms

Coming back from a long break from Unity and need a refresh? Coming from a different game engine, or a computer science background? Just don’t want to watch any videos and are confident you’ll pick it up? Here are a handful of key terms you’ll certainly want to refresh yourself on:

Unity Term	Similar Concepts	Definition
Asset	Resource	Files which are saved in your project’s Assets directory. Everything which makes up your game is saved as an asset of various kinds (scenes, 3d models, textures, sounds, scripts, etc).
Scene	Map, Level	A physical space containing other assets, arranged and configured to create an interactive experience. The end product of your project are the scenes you create.
Game Object	Entity, Object	Instances of anything in the game scene. Including lights, text, players, walls, and even abstract things, like triggers. All Game Objects have a position, rotation, and size.
Prefab	Blueprint, Class	Preconfigured Game Objects, which can be saved as assets for reuse
Component	Script, Behavior	Game Objects are assigned multiple components which define how they work in the game. A player object would have a movement component so it moves when a players gives input as well as a collider component so they can’t walk through walls.
Property	Field, Component Setting	Each component has properties that can be adjusted in the inspector to modify how it behaves. For example, a light component has a color property.