What Can You Do with Unity Game Engine?

Nowadays Unity3D is so popular and many people wonder about the capabilities of this great development environment. In this article, we will take a closer look at what you can create using Unity3D.

Basically, Unity3D is a game engine that you can create high-quality, cross-platform digital games. Even though the principal development aim of Unity3D is developing games, today it is used in different industries other than video gaming; like architecture, engineering, education, and movies. With enough effort and technical knowledge, you can create any kind of games, applications, simulations, movies, 3D illustrations, and much more.

In this article, I will write about the capabilities of Unity3D with lots of examples of work that is created by using it. Hence, you will have a much broad point of view on how and what it is used for. These are the questions that you may have asked and that you will find the answers here:

• Why is Unity so popular?
• What is Unity used for?
  • Games made with Unity
  • Applications made with Unity
    • Education
    • Film Industry
    • Architecture, Engineering and Construction
    • Automative
• Can I create works like above with Unity?

Why is Unity so popular?

Behind the popularity of Unity3D lies not only it is a complete, cross-platform development environment for games but also its beginner-friendly construction, asset store, great documentation, and helpful community and fair licensing.

Developing a complex game from zero requires a lot of human power and it takes a long time. Unity presents a base and lots of useful tools to prevent developers to rediscover America. It has a built-in render engine and a physics engine. Hence, you do not need to write low-level complex code that extends the time of creation.

Unity highly reduces the requirement of computer science knowledge and thus, gives the opportunity to artists to create games.

If you use Unity3D in order to create your apps, you do not have to write your code again for other platforms. You can build your project for different operating systems, game consoles, mobile platforms easily.

It has a great market(asset store) that you can buy models, UI elements, music, sound and visual effects and scripts which are created by other Unity users.

Unity has a great community. There are lots of tutorials that are made by other developers on Youtube or blogs(like this blog :). Additionally, you will find lots of helpful people on Unity Forums and Facebook groups.

Unity is completely free if you did not earn money more than 100000 USD in the last year. This licensing model is the most important thing that makes it widely spread around the world.

What is Unity used for?

As mentioned above, Unity is used for creating games, applications, movies, education materials, models, simulations etc. Let’s see some great examples of them.

Games made with Unity

Day after day, lots of new people get into game development and many of them wonder capabilities of the game engines like Unity. If you would like to make a game, you should understand this: You can achieve anything you want using Unity3D with sufficient technical knowledge, creativity and effort.

You can develop 2D, 3D, AR, or VR games with Unity3D in any genre, single-player or multiplayer. It gives you good optimization tools that make your game super fast in low-end devices or good rendering tools that make your games visually amazing in high-end devices. This does not mean you cannot achieve high-quality graphics in low-end devices but instead, it has capabilities to make them great if you have sufficient technical knowledge.

In the past, developing games are very expensive and they can be built by big studios. Today, with game engines like Unity, small independent studios live their golden age. Unity is widely used by independent small studios and solo developers around the world. Let’s see some of the games that are built by independent studios and solo developers that use Unity:

Alto’s Adventure(2015) was developed by a three-person, small independent studio Snowman, and gained a big success on mobile platforms at the year published. It is a side-scrolling, endless runner with nice gameplay in a great atmosphere.

Tunic is an action-adventure game that has not been released but expected to be released in 2020. It has been developing by independent solo developer Andrew Shouldice for Windows, macOS and Xbox One.

Harold Halibut is another great example that shows the capabilities of Unity. It is still under development but trailers show a lot about it. It has been developing by independent game studio Slow Bros.

Ori and the Blind Forest is a 2D game that was developed by a relatively larger independent studio, Moons Studios, and published by Microsoft Game Studios in 2015.

Escape From Tarkov is a first-person shooter that is developed by Battlestate Games.

Not only solo developers or independent studios use Unity but also much bigger studios use it to create games. An example is Super Mario Run that is developed by Nintendo.

Of course there are thousands of games made with Unity. We can enlarge this list with a lot of successful games that have great game mechanics and stunning visual quality. Here, I just wanted to give you a little intuition about the capabilities of the engine.

Applications made with Unity

Beyond developing games, Unity is widely used in other industries also. Let’s take a quick look to some of them.

Education

Shapes is developed to help students explore and understand 3D geometry by an intuitive way.

Labster is a virtual laboratory that allow students to make experiments as if they are in a real laboratory.

CAE VimedixAR is an application which is developed for healthcare learners that allows them to discover human anatomy using the help of Augmented Reality.

Film Industry

By using High Definition Rendering Pipeline(HDRP), VFX Graph, Cinemachine and other useful tools, you can shoot movies with stunning graphics. Let’s see some examples of them:

Every year, Unity’s Demo Team makes an animated movie using Unity to show Unity’s latest features. The Heretic is one of them that is exciting.

Sonder is another great example of a short animation made with Unity3D.

Architecture, Engineering, and Construction

Unity3D and its VR and AR tools are widely used in architecture, engineering and construction for visualization purposes. Here is a good example:

And another example for architectural visualization:

Automative

Unity3D is also used for autonomous vehicle development with its AI features. Here is a talk about it.

Can I create works like above with Unity?

Yes, you can. But all these things are not easy to create. All of them requires a high level of expertise, long working hours and creativity.

You should keep in mind that game engines are just tools. Owning a pen and paper will not make you a poet. This is the same here. If you would like to create something like above, you have to work hard.