Once I made the decision to try learning Unity again, it was time to revisit Unity's learning resources. This was one aspect that I appreciated about Unity: they have continuously worked to lower their barrier to entry. Complete beginners are started on tutorials that walk us through building microgames, which are prebuilt Unity projects that show many of the basic elements of a game. Several different microgames are available, each representing a different game genre, so a beginner can choose whichever one that appeals to them.

But first an ambitious Unity student had to install Unity itself. Right now Unity releases are named by year much like other software like Ubuntu. Today, the microgame tutorials tell beginners to install version 2019.4 but did not explain why. I was curious why they tell people to install a version that is approaching two years old so I did a little digging. The answer is that Unity designates specific versions as LTS (Long Term Support) releases. Unity LTS is intended to be a stable and reliable version, with the best library compatibility and the most complete product documentation. More recent releases may have shiny new features, but a beginner wouldn't need them and it makes sense to start with the latest LTS. Which, as of this writing, is 2019.4.

I vaguely recall running through one of these microgame exercises on an earlier attempt at Unity. I chose the karting microgame because I had always liked driving games. Gran Turismo on Sony PlayStation (the originals in both cases, before either got numbers) was what drew me into console gaming. But I ran out of steam on the karting microgame and those lessons did not stick. Since I'm effectively starting from scratch, I might as well start with a new microgame, and the newest hotness released just a few months ago is the LEGO microgame. Representing third-person view games like Tomb Raider and, well, the LEGO video games we can buy right now!

I don't know what kind of business arrangement behind the scenes made it possible to have digital LEGO resources in our Unity projects, but I am thankful it exists. And since Unity doesn't own the rights to these assets, the EULA for starting a LEGO microgame is far longer than for the other microgames using generic game assets. I was not surprised to find clauses forbidding use of these assets in commercial projects, but I was mildly surprised that we are only allowed to host them on Unity's project hosting site. We can't even host them on our own sites elsewhere. But the most unexpected clause in the EULA is that all LEGO creations depicted in our minigames must be creatable with real LEGO bricks. We are not allowed to invent LEGO bricks that do not exist in real life. I don't find that restriction onerous, just surprising but made sense in hindsight. I'm not planning to invent an implausible LEGO brick in my own tutorial run so I should be fine.