Welcome to another blog post about Unity for absolute beginners. If you've searched around for "how to start Unity," you already know the drill: install the engine, drag a cube into the scene, slap a Rigidbody on it, write ten lines of code to make it jump. Video over, you made the thing move, it feels really productive right?
That's actually how I started learning Unity as well. But I was struggling really bad. I could not wrap my head around what and why things were happening. Now, that I have been using Unity to design my games for over 6 years, I understand what my biggest issue was trying to learn the engine. That's why my teaching method is a different from all the others out there.
Here's the problem, and I understand why most people would quit after taking a course or two. Not because Unity is too hard, but because nobody explained what's actually happening under the hood before throwing them at the code editor. You can't debug what you don't understand, and you definitely can't build anything beyond a tutorial's exact steps if you don't know why those steps exist in that order.
So my approach is unusual. At this stage you don't have to learn how to make the player jump. Instead I'm going to cover the three things I wish someone had explained to me before I touched a single script: the game loop, how references work, and why starting stupidly small is the actual skill that separates people who finish games from people who don't.
Let's dive in!


