Tech Setup

Setting up Unity and Visual Studio / Code

  1. Download Unity Hub: https://unity.com/download

  2. Open Unity Hub, and download the latest version of Unity Editor with long term support (LTS) — currently this is 6000.0.43f.

  3. Any editor version from 2022 or later should work fine, too.

  4. When downloading the Unity Editor, make sure to include the following modules (in check boxes)

  5. âś… Microsoft Visual Studio Community
    (*only available on WINDOWS)

    • If prompted to run the Visual Studio Installer, make sure that “Game Development with Unity” is checked under the Workloads tab.

    • If you’re using a Mac device:
      Because Visual Studio for Mac is no longer supported, you’ll need to download Visual Studio Code instead.

    Next, install the Unity for Visual Studio Code extension (published by Microsoft) from the Visual Studio Code Marketplace, or the Extensions Marketplace inside Visual Studio Code.

  6. âś… Windows Build Support (IL2CPP or Mono)

  7. âś… Mac Build Support (IL2CPP or Mono)

  8. Make a New Unity Project from Unity Hub.

In Unity Hub, go to Projects > New Project > Select your editor version at the dropdown field above > Select Universal 3D (To start, we will use the Universal Render Pipeline and create a 3D Unity Project.)

All Unity projects are stored locally as a folder on your computer. Select a name (e.g. “GameEngineWeek1”) and location for your project folder.

We’ll leave “Connect to Unity Cloud” and “Use Unity Version Control” unchecked for now.

Then click “Create Project.”

  1. Set up Unity for Visual Studio / Code integration

Open up your newly created Unity project. In the Unity Editor, go to Windows > Package Manager > Make sure that Visual Studio Editor package (version 2.0.20 and above) has been installed on your project.

Then, go to Edit > Preferences > External Tools > Select your External Script Editor as either “Visual Studio” or “Visual Studio Code”. This will be the default program that runs when you try to open up a script in Unity.


Intellisense for Unity C#

Intellisense is a useful auto-complete feature that will give a list of suggestions for your code as you're typing. I recommend getting this working on your scripting program, because it will make the process of understanding C# a lot more assisted and easier to navigate. It is also helpful for referencing variables and functions across multiple scripts in your projects.

Here's some places to start troubleshooting if it is not working on your program: