Get Started with Unity “Project Tiny”

Project Tiny is the preview package of Unity which can be use to create Instant games. From Unity version 2018.3 or higher has support for this feature. To start work with Project Tiny you should have a basic knowledge of TypeScript (from Project Tiny preview-0.16.1 C# is supported) and understanding about Unity’s new Entity Component System (ECS) because It uses a pure data-oriented ECS .

To work on Project Tiny, first you have to create a 2D Unity project(Still Unity doesn’t have support for 3D instance game) and then you have to install the preview package to the project. Let’s install the Preview Package.

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• Select All packages in the left top corner in the new Preview Package window if it is not selected.
• Find in the list or search for Tiny Mode and select it.
• Select the newest version of Tiny Mode or any other version you would like to use and click Install, on the top right corner.

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After installation You can see the new tab in between Component and Window calls Tiny. Which mean you have installed Project Tiny successfully.

Import a Sample Project

• Click
  • Tiny  —-> File —-> Import Sample Project

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Open Project Tiny samples

Unity has provided few game and non-game samples to get an understanding about Instant Game development.

To open one of sample project

• Open
  • Assets —-> TinySamples
• Select the project that you wish to open
• Find the utproject  file of selected  project
• Double click on that

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Or

• Click
  • Tiny  —-> File Open Project
• Open
  • TinySamples folder
• Open one of a project folder you want
• Double click on the .utproject  file

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This will open the project and you will notice a different in the hierarchy view compare to normal unity project. It has a new drop down calls Load .

Play the game

As same as other Unity projects, you can play the game you opened using Play Button. But not like other projects, It will fire a server internally and open the project in the browser to play (localhost:someport).

And you can see a QR code in the game view of Unity editor. By scanning it, you can play the game on your mobile if your computer and the phone has connected to the same Wi-Fi connection.

Getting started development

As I mentioned before to development you should have an understanding about ECS and Typescript. In this short blog post I am not going to explain those.

Create a new Project Tiny project

• Click
  • Tiny —-> File —-> New Project
• In the opening window Type a name to the project
• Click  
  • Save

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When you are creating a new Project Tiny project, Unity will create 3 folders to store Entity groups, components and systems of the project inside that project  folder and special .utproject file. It doesn’t matter how you are creating those Entities, components or systems. It will automatically saved inside that appropriate folder.

More on those 3 folders,

• Entity – to store entity groups of the project.
• Component – to store component of the Project.
• System – to store systems of the project.

How to create Entity Groups, Components and Systems

• Right click
  • On the created project folder
• Create —-> Tiny
  • —-> Entity Group  (To create Entity Groups)
  • —-> Component   (To create components)
  • —-> System  (To create Systems)

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For more information:

• Unity at GDC 2019

• Unity’s Project Tiny Workshop

• Category: Game Development, Unity
• Tag: game development, Instant Games, project-tiny, unity