#i was in CS not game dev but it is. the same situation i saw my classmates fail at

[local-magpie]

Any time you learn a technique, piece of software, engine, etc in ANY field - yes i mean ANY - you are learning How To Learn, not just the actual literal thing in front of you. The trick is to realize you are not limited to the specific buttons and keywords you used and to build on that for yourself, which also gets easier with time. Even if you go on to use Unity, you should be doing this anyways, or else you will be banging your head against the wall trying to do everything from scratch instead of finding existing tools to help you. The point of the class is to give you enough basics to know where to look next and/or understand the answers you find!

Okay at this point I've seen so many students feeling doomed for taking a course where a teacher uses Unity or like they're wasting time learning the engine, and while understandably the situation at Unity sucks and is stressful for everyone: y'all need to stop thinking learning Unity a waste of your time.

Learning a game engine does not dictate your abilities as a dev, and the skills you learn in almost any engine are almost all transferrable skills when moving to other engines. Almost every new job you get in the games industry will use new tools, engines and systems no matter where you work, whether that be proprietary, enterprise or open-source. Skills you learn in any engine are going to be relevant even if the software is not - especially if you're learning development for the first time. Hell, even the act of learning a game engine is a transferrable skill.

It's sort of like saying it's a waste to learn Blender because people use 3DS Max, or why bother learning how to use a Mac when many people use Windows; it's all the same principals applied differently. The knowledge is still fundamental and applicable across tools.

Many engines use C-adjacent languages. Many engines use similar IDE interfaces. Many engines use Object Oriented Programming. Many engines have component-based architecture. Many objects handle data and modular prefabs and inheritence in a similar way. You are going to be learning skills that are applicable everywhere, and hiring managers worth their weight will be well aware of this.

The first digital game I made was made in Flash in 2009. I'm still using some principles I learned then. I used Unity for almost a decade and am now learning Godot and finding many similarities between the two. If my skills and knowledge are somehow still relevant then trust me: you are going to learn a lot of useful skills using Unity.