[ehnto]

Unity is deceptive in that it is easy to scratch the surface, but gets more complex than it needs to be for simple game features quite quickly. Unity has an immense depth and breadth to its feature set, it is frankly, too much game engine to fuss with if you just want to try making games. In my opinion. There are just so many new, engine specific concepts at play that you are not learning games, you are learning Unity.

If you are a programmer and want to dable then a code first framework like LÖVE might be less cognitive load. If you prefer a more featured framework then Godot is also a really great lightweight engine, but you will spend more time in the GUI than in the code.

Don't sell yourself short either, you have an advantage by knowing some backend concepts! A lot of people start from zero programming experience and jump into games.

[protocolture]

Yeah my experience with Unity was that, if you are doing something the Unity way, its very easy. If you want to do something that the Unity devs never considered, you are at best developing from scratch, at worst existing Unity systems are going to stand in your way.

I built a prototype Metal Fatigue tech demo (No real game logic as such, just the framework) and I found that heightmap based deforming terrain for the underground drill rig to dig through was so outside the design intent of unity that it would be the sole thing I spent hundreds of hours working on to get it past the tech demo stage. Like I got it working, but its so tenuous I could never ship it as is. Not to mention the default modules were writing my changes back to the heightmap object, saving them when that was unintended. I think the code I was using was intended for tooling, not for game logic.

And the Unity Store is great if you need a plugin to clone some mobile game system, but once you went to any depth it was just a hook to get 50 bucks out of you for no gain.

Its an interesting ecosystem.