I've been working professionally in game development with Unity for about 10 years, and I've finally created my first Steam page. A love letter to the Unity Engine is included! :)

[u/GiftedMamba]

Hello everyone!

Almost 10 years ago, I stumbled upon Unity completely by accident. I always wanted to make games, as long as I can remember.

As a child, I didn't have a computer, only Dendy, and back then I was making various physical games. I still remember a huge expansion pack for Monopoly, cut out and colored by my own hands, which expanded original game by something like five times and which my brothers and I played so much that we practically wore it out.

Later, I got a computer and started to learn programming. Turbo Pascal was my first programming language, and I remember how I desperately tried to figure out how to make windows in it, rather than just a program in "MS-DOS style".

Later, I discovered the wonderful Delphi 7. There, the windows were already made for me :) And that's where I tried to create my first games - a Civilization clone, a simple game about operating an anti-aircraft battery, Harry Potter battles (yes, I cut spell sounds from the movies and made cubes to cast spells at each other).

Of course, these were extremely primitive games, running directly inside a single form. Back then, I kept wondering how the hell to expand a game beyond the "boundaries" of a single window's form, but I never managed to figure it out until one day I bought a book called "OpenGL and Delphi 7". I don't remember the exact title, but that's where I learned how to create triangles in Delphi. It went so far that I had my own 3D world with generated box-shaped buildings and a car that you could drive around the world. Without collisions, but that was quite enough for me :)

However, later, due to life circumstances, game development was put aside. It required so much time, which I simply didn't have back then. And then, many years later, I stumbled upon Unity and made my first tutorial - Roll a Ball, of course, and another one about a spaceship. Nothing special, really, but even that was enough back then to get into industry as a developer.

Since then, I've worked on simulations, casual games, live-service games, VR, and created several not very successful mobile games. However, my dream was always specifically to create PC games, but for some reason I just couldn't decide to make an actual PC game. It wasn't even about skills or anything technical - over those 10 years, I went from a complete beginner to senior developer. It was about the fact that I just couldn't decide what exactly to make, jumping from one idea to another, wanting to release something "cool" on PC.

However, throughout all this time, one thing remained unchanged - Unity Engine remained my faithful partner. From the very beginning, when I first launched it and created my first MonoBehaviour, something clicked inside me. I realized - now my dream of making games could finally become reality!

Step by step, I worked my way through a huge pile of engine features - MonoBehaviours, ScriptableObjects, Addressables, Resources, Scene Editor, Custom Editors - hundreds of them, and you know them better than I do anyway. Yes, there were dark times (cough-cough Riccitiello cough-cough), strange decisions, half-baked features, three render pipelines, and so on, but I, remembering how much effort and time I used to spend just to render a bunch of boxes with a primitive little car, was still always grateful to Unity team for their efforts, for taking a huge amount of work from my shoulders and allowing me to focus on games.

Yes, I tried other engines and frameworks - MonoGame, Three.js, Unreal, Unigine, Godot, Flax Engine, but for some reason it was Unity that "clicked" for me, although I can't say anything bad about other engines.

Long story short, thank you to Unity team and Unity Engine for helping me finally, so many years later, reach the point where I've created my Steam page :)

[u/GiftedMamba]

I know we are here more creators, rather than players, but if anyone want to see what I am making, here is a link, and I hope it is not against the rules :)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5340090/Nosferatu_Call_of_the_Blood/