Getting Started With Unity: 3 Things Beginners Should Learn Before Even Installing The Program

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!

 

What You're Actually Controlling...

Every Unity tutorial starts the same way: here's the Hierarchy, here's the Inspector, here's the Scene view. Fine, sure, you'll learn where the buttons are. But knowing where a button lives isn't the same as knowing why you're pressing it. You can memorize that Rigidbody lives under Add Component without having the faintest idea why your object suddenly falls through the floor when you add one. The interface is just a window into a system, and if you don't understand the system, the window is just a bunch of unlabeled dials.

You're controlling game objects inside a game loop like a marionette, and it's genuinely the first thing worth understanding.

 

The Unity Game Loop, A Simple Explanation

A game isn't a program that runs once top to bottom like a script. It's a program that runs a specific set of steps, over and over, dozens of times per second (depending on your processor speed), for as long as the game is open. That repeating cycle is the game loop, and Unity is built entirely around it. Every script you'll ever write hooks into some part of this cycle.

Roughly, here's what happens on every single frame (again, it depends on your computer speed):

Input check → Physics update → Game logic (Update) → Rendering → Repeat

Break that down a bit more and you get something closer to this:

Frame starts
  → Read player input (keyboard, mouse, controller)
  → FixedUpdate() runs (physics, movement math)
  → Update() runs (game logic, most of your code)
  → LateUpdate() runs (camera follows, cleanup)
  → Scene gets rendered to the screen
Frame ends, next frame starts immediately

This is why Unity gives you methods like Update() and FixedUpdate() instead of just letting you write one big script that runs start to finish. You're not writing "the game." You're writing instructions that get slotted into a specific stage of a loop that's already running, forever, without you.

Below is an example what a loop is (and what it does). Each script you write can have its own loop. The scanner goes a lot faster of course, but to illustrate what is happening here I slowed it down a bit. It's checking if the player presses the space bar key to make the character jump for example. Can you guess what happens when the player presses the 'A' key on the keyboard? Answer is at the end of this article.

Update() runs once per frame frame 0

void Update()

{

if (Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.Space))

{

Jump();

}

 

if (Input.GetKey(KeyCode.A))

{

transform.Translate(Vector3.left * speed);

}

 

timer += Time.deltaTime;

}

Every line gets checked, every single frame, that's the loop.

If more scripts use this loop, well guess what - the more requires the computer to compute each loop. Plop this on hundreds of game objects, the slower your game will be. Once this clicks, a bunch of confusing beginner questions answer themselves. 

 

Using Loops The Right Way 

Why does my movement feel jittery? You probably put physics-based movement in Update() instead of FixedUpdate(), and Update() doesn't run at a fixed, consistent rate the way physics needs. Why did my object move before the camera caught up? Because LateUpdate() exists specifically to run after everything else, so cameras and followers don't lag a frame behind. These aren't random quirks. They're direct consequences of the loop.

You don't need to memorize every method today. You just need to internalize the one big idea: your code doesn't run once, it runs repeatedly as part of a cycle you don't control the timing of. Everything else about scripting in Unity builds on top of that.

 

References: How Objects Actually Talk To Each Other

Okay, so your code runs every frame. Great. But a game isn't one script doing one thing, it's dozens of objects that need to know about each other. The player needs to know if it's touching an enemy. The UI needs to know the player's health. The enemy needs to know where the player currently is. None of that works unless objects can point at each other, and that's what a reference is!

Think of a reference less like a copy and more like a name tag pointing at the real thing:

PlayerHealth script  --(reference)-->  Player GameObject
HealthBar UI script   --(reference)-->  PlayerHealth script
EnemyAI script         --(reference)-->  Player Transform

Nothing here is being duplicated. The HealthBar isn't storing its own separate copy of your health value, it's holding a pointer to the actual PlayerHealth component, and reading its current value whenever it needs to. Change the real one, and every reference sees the change immediately, because they're all looking at the same object.

This is exactly why the classic beginner error, NullReferenceException, happens so often. It's not some obscure bug, it's Unity telling you, very literally: "you asked me to use a reference that isn't pointing at anything." Maybe you forgot to drag the object into the Inspector slot. Maybe the object got destroyed before something else tried to reference it. Either way, once you understand references as name tags rather than boxes full of data, that error stops being scary and starts being obvious to diagnose: something doesn't have its tag hooked up.

You'll wire references together constantly, through the Inspector by dragging objects into public fields, or in code with things like GetComponent<T>() or FindObjectOfType<T>(). All of these are just different ways of answering the same question: "how does this script get its hands on that other object?" Maybe you've heard of 'spaghetti code', this is when developers make a mess out of handling references. So much, that sometimes they don't remember who references what, why and how. There are techniques, tips, and tricks you can learn (from me :) to avoid this from happening. But there are other articles about that on the site and goes beyond the scope of this article.

 

Why starting small isn't a compromise, it's the method

Here's the part almost nobody tells beginners honestly: your first project should be embarrassingly small. Not "small" as in a simplified version of the game in your head. Small as in one mechanic, no art, no story, no menu.

The instinct to jump straight into your dream project is completely understandable and also the single biggest reason people burn out before finishing anything. A full game means juggling the game loop, references, UI, save systems, audio, and art direction all at once, on day one, with zero experience in any of them. That's not learning, that's drowning.

Starting small works because it isolates variables. Build one mechanic. See how it slots into the loop. See what references it needs. Then add one more thing.

Move a capsule with input
  → Add a jump using FixedUpdate
  → Detect a collision using OnTriggerEnter
  → Reference a UI Text to show a score
  → Now you've basically built a tiny platformer

Each step is small enough to actually finish in an afternoon, and each one teaches you something that transfers directly to bigger projects later. You're not making a "toy" version of learning, you're doing the exact same thing professional developers do when prototyping: strip a mechanic down to its bare bones, get it feeling right in isolation, then build outward from something that already works.

 

So which approach should you actually take?

If you're brand new, resist the urge to open a 12-hour "build a full Zelda like game" tutorial as your very first Unity experience. Here's a rough gut-check for where to start:

• Never touched Unity before? Well, give yourself a pat on the back since you're almost done reading this article :)
• Comfortable with the loop but confused by errors? You're probably missing how references work, not struggling with "real" programming.
• Understand both but paralyzed on what to build? Pick one single mechanic. Not a game. One mechanic. Finish it this week.

Notice none of these involve "learn the entire interface first." The interface will make sense once you know what it's a window into.

 

Wrapping Up

Unity tutorials love to get you moving a cube in the first five minutes because it feels productive. But motion without understanding just means you're copying steps you can't adapt later. Learn the game loop first, so you know why your code runs when it runs. Learn references, so you know why your objects can talk to each other, and why they sometimes suddenly can't. Then start small, deliberately, on purpose, not because you're not ready for something bigger, but because that's genuinely how you get ready for something bigger.

The cube moving can wait a day, you're going to do those things a lot. This stuff can't.

 

~happy Coding!