While the GameStop stock story has used up almost all the available bandwidth for talking about the intersection of video games and Wall Street lately, there’s been another such story in recent months that hasn’t received nearly the fanfare. Since joining the ranks of publicly traded companies in October, Unity Technologies has seen its value nearly double. That probably shouldn’t come as a huge shock considering Unity and its game engine’s place in the industry. Currently, 94 of the top 100 global game development companies are Unity customers — and more than half of the top 1,000 mobile games in Apple’s App Store and Google Play were generated on the Unity platform. As the place where huge swathes of today’s video game creation begins, The 2021 Premium Unity Game Developer Certification Bundle ($44.99, over 90 percent off, from TNW Deals) is where young game builders can get familiar with the tools and take advantage of the capabilities of the world’s most powerful game creation engine. The massive 17-course collection is where a newbie learns all about Unity, from how to create the most amazing game experiences to the nitty gritty of monetization, distribution and the other mechanics of conceiving and delivering your video game world to players everywhere. For anyone who’s ever entertained the idea of creating their own games, courses like Intro to Mobile Game Development and The Secret to Smoother Gameplay with Unity AI can help give that dream some form. From basic tools and commands, other courses get into more specific areas of world building, including everything from Unity’s drag-and-drop system for creating advanced effects to generating 3D game environments that leap off the screen. But if you want to learn anything, you’ve got to jump in and do it yourself. That’s where a host of courses explain portions of game creation as you actually create a game, like learning to code by making an air hockey game or understanding how to use artificial intelligence to make a tank game and a space travel game. Once you’re finished these hands-on projects and created a game of your own, there’s also coursework in how it can make you some money too. By helping developers incorporate ads into their games as well as utilize in-app purchases, creators can start generating income to help make their games even bigger and better. The courses in the 2021 Premium Unity Game Developer Certification Bundle usually retail for $3,400, but right now, the complete package is on sale for a fraction of that total, just $44.99. Prices are subject to change.
