Everyone Starts With Unity. I Think That’s a Mistake.

When you begin game development, jumping straight into a powerful engine like Unity may be the fastest way to quit.

You want to make games. Everyone tells you to use Unity. And that’s exactly where most beginners break.

It happened to me. I was twenty-two, fresh out of a coding bootcamp, buzzing with ideas. I downloaded Unity with this naive confidence, like I was about to build the next Stardew Valley in a weekend instead, I spent eight hours trying to get a capsule to move without rolling down an invisible hill. By Sunday, I was convinced I was bad at programming.

I wasn’t bad. I was just drowning.

The problem wasn’t Unity. The problem is that we’ve convinced a whole generation of first‑time devs that you learn game development by picking a pro engine first. We don’t send people who want to cook to a Michelin‑star kitchen, but we hand them Unity and say “now make a game.”

Let’s talk about why this is backwards and, more importantly, what actually works.

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The illusion of the easy start

Unity is free. It’s got more tutorials than you could watch in a hundred years. The asset store promises ready‑made characters, music, even shader effects. On the surface, the barrier to entry looks low, like it’s almost nonexistent.

The hidden price tag is the complexity underneath. Unity is not just a tool for making games; it is a complete operating system for game creation. It comes with an animation system, lightmapping, occlusion culling, a physics engine (and two different physics modes if you count Box2D vs Nvidia Physx), shadergraph, the input system, and enough inspector knobs to fill a cockpit.

The tutorial industry has adapted. You can now follow a 40‑minute video and end up with a walking character, some trees, a health bar, and absolutely zero understanding of how any of it works.

And that is where the mistake happens. The tutorial gives you the end result, but the moment you try to change something, you realise you don’t speak the language. You only memorised the phrases.

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What Unity is actually for

I need to be clear I’m not trashing Unity here. In all fairness, Unity is an incredible platform. It was designed for teams. It was designed for people who already know how to make simple games from scratch and want to scale up quickly. Prefabs, the component pattern, serialised data these things solve real production problems once you already understand the basics.

When you’ve never written a game loop, you don’t know which of Unity’s features are solving real headaches and which ones are just more overhead. You end up fighting the engine more than you fight your own code, and that’s a miserable place to learn from.

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The better start (and it’s not glamorous)

So what should you begin with? A framework. One that handles only the bare essential: windowing and input and drawing, but leaves everything else up to you.

I recommend Python with Pygame, or if you’re okay with something a bit lower level, Lua with Love2D. Both will ask three things of you:

1. Create a window.
2. Run a loop that updates your game objects and redraws them.
3. Handle keyboard presses.

That’s it. There is no inspector. No component system you’re not sure about. No prefabs.

In that environment, every single thing you make teaches you a piece of computer science disguised as a problem. Want a paddle that stops moving when it reaches the screen edge? Now you’ve just learned clamping, which is just min/max logic. Want to spawn ten enemies from a list and destroy them after three seconds? That’s iteration and time tracking with delta time not engine magic.

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Let me give a concrete example. In Pygame, a simple Pong clone is under 150 lines. In that space, you own every if statement, every variable. If your ball flies off screen at high speed, you trace the logic yourself. You learn by owning the bug.

In Unity, Pong is also achievable quickly via the physics engine, but many learners never write any game logic at all they just tweak drag values or box collider sizes, which doesn’t transfer well anywhere.

What happens after two frameworks

Here’s a personal story to make this land better. After failing with Unity the first time, I switched to Love2D and built Breakout. It took me three days. But in those three days I finally understood what an update() function actually is not in theory, but because my ball’s position depended on calling it each frame.

A year later I wrote a Zelda‑dungeon‑style game in Python from scratch (Pygame, not an engine). That game had a tilemap parser and a combat system, all built by me. I could have never reached that confidence inside Unity’s component soup.

Then I came back to Unity. The difference was dramatic. I no longer looked at the Inspector as a magical properties pane. I saw serialized variables I could set from a MonoBehaviour and control with Start() and Update(). I understood components as a composition system, not because a tutorial said it but because I’d already solved that problem with a dictionary or a class.

The engine finally made sense.

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And I suspect this is the case for many people who stick with game dev they start with something minimal, hit real friction, and then later return to Unity as power users, not as confused tourists.

The hidden danger of the visual crutch

One of the biggest traps in beginning with Unity is its editor. When you can drag and drop assets onto a scene, set positions by typing numbers into transform fields, and connect scripts via the inspector without ever instantiating objects manually, you lose the muscle memory of how a game actually initializes.

Think about it like learning to drive in an automatic with all the driver assist systems on. You’ll never learn to feel the clutch, you’ll never know what it actually means to rev too low and stall. Then you get a manual rental car and suddenly you have zero intuition for the gear shifts, even though “driving” felt easy before.

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In the world of game logic: when you never instantiate a bullet via script in code, but just drag a prefab into a script variable, you skip building a mental model of how an object’s lifecycle actually works in memory. That gap comes to bite you hard the moment you need to dynamically spawn waves of enemies from a JSON file. You’ll search the forums for “how to instantiate in a loop Unity 2D” instead of knowing that you can just instantiate in a loop and it doesn’t change between engine types.

What I wish someone told me (and what you should know)

This is not a take where I’m saying nobody should use Unity. This article is aimed exactly at the people who are about to start, and are choosing their first tool. If that’s you, I would ask you this:

Do you want to learn to make games and understand how they work underneath? Or do you want to learn how to operate one specific engine’s workflow? The two are related, but the first is a durable career skill, the second is a vendor relationship.

You can absolutely start from a framework, and in my honest opinion, you’ll learn more, faster, and with less frustration about things that aren’t the engine.

But I also want you to give yourself permission to be confused. That’s part of the trade. I still open Unity and feel the imposter syndrome creep in when I see shadergraph graphs. The difference now is that I understand how a pixel shader is just a per-pixel operation. Because I wrote one manually.

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Practical roadmap (if you want one)

1. Phase One: Choose either Python+Pygame or Love2D (Lua). Write a small breakout game, or pong, or snake. Make it work without any external assets you design your own pixel shapes. Get it playable and feel the loop.

2. Phase Two: Make something tile-based. Maybe a simple RPG grid movement (Zelda style). Use lists and arrays to store the map. You’ve now learned about coordinate transforms.

3. Phase Three: Only then pick your first full engine. Could be Unity, Godot, GameMaker, whatever. But you now walk in with the confidence of knowing: a game is an array of objects updated in a loop drawn on a screen that responds to buttons.

Everything beyond that is just a better way of organizing those objects.

And you won’t be lost anymore.

Photo by Ferenc Almasi on Unsplash

Final thoughts

Starting with Unity felt like the logical path until I tried it. And failing at that path nearly made me quit game development altogether. I can’t help but wonder how many potential developers drop out not because they can’t code, but because they started three steps in front of themselves.

The engine can wait. The fundamentals won’t wait, though you can always catch them after. It’s just more painful that way.

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Now I’m curious: what did you start with for your first programming project, game-related or not? Did you dive into the deep engine, or did somebody point you to Pygame or Love? Would you recommend a different path today for a total beginner? I’d really love to know your thoughts. Drop them in the responses.

And if this article spoke to you and you want more writing on game development and practical programming growth, come visit my profile I write about these ideas pretty often.

Happy coding, and go make a ball bounce on a paddle before you open any project wizard.