The siren song of 3D

The biggest barrier to your success as a Unity game developer is finishing a project. The idea stage that you enter when you sit staring at that endless 3D plane is crucial to you overcoming that barrier. If you choose the right idea, you will have a much better shot at finishing. Choose the wrong idea, and you might crash and burn. Then you'll probably go back to school and study to be an accountant. Starting in game development and ending in accounting is your worst case scenario. Let's avoid that at all costs.

Before you even begin, the odds are stacked against you. That endless 3D plane is calling you, begging you to start a project that's way over your head. You may begin thinking of the other 3D games you've played: gritty, wide-open "sandbox" games like Crackdown or Grand Theft Auto; tightly-controlled platformer games with lots of exploration and interesting challenges like Super Mario 64; sweeping, epic role-playing games like Fable or Fallout 3. All of these games have a few things in common: an animated character or first-person camera moving around in a physics-based environment; a rich and detailed 3D world with maps, quests, non-player characters, and pick-ups; and teams of hundreds of people burning through multimillion dollar budgets.

Odds are that you're not reading this book with 99 of your closest, wealthiest friends who all want to help you build your game. You need to ignore the dizzying and endless scope that eternal 3D plane implies, and foster the creativity and resourcefulness that will get you from point A to point B; that is, from an idea to a finished game.