Unity Editor — Making your Layout
At this point you have now begun your first project and are staring at the Unity Editor a little bit baffled. Let’s take a moment to break everything down.
On the left you are going to see a tab called ‘Hierarchy.’ The Hierarchy is a list of everything that is in your current Scene. When you make a Unity project, everything is broken down into Scenes. Think of them as a new room or level in the game. It is a simple way to separate things instead of having to develop the first and last level of a game in all one thing spot.
When you click on any object in the Hierarchy, you should see some more details about that object on the right in the ‘Inspector’ tab. Best example of this is the Transform at the top. This represents the position of that object in the world, as well as if there is any rotation or scaling to their size.
Down below you will see the ‘Project’ tab. Unlike the Hierarchy, this section does not contain the objects in the current scene, but contains all files that exist within the entire project. Here you will keep track of everything from coding scripts to audio tracks and everything else needed to create your product.
And now for possibly the most important tabs. Right in the middle, you are most likely glaring at an interesting horizon looking thing. This is either in the ‘Scene’ view or the ‘Game’ view. The Game view is going to show you what the player will be seeing when they are in this scene. The Scene view is the behind the scenes look (no pun intended). It is where you will actually be moving the objects and changing things around and then checking the game view to see how it looks. There is a clear problem here that we are going to solve immediately. The Scene view and Game view are not visible at the same time. So grab one of their tabs and drag it below or above the other. This way they are both visible, which will help a ton with your on the fly designing.
Once you’ve done that, you can grab any of the tabs and set them up however you’d like. It is your Unity Editor and you should be comfortable with it. Maybe you even have multiple monitors and you want to spread out more. Go for it! Once you have found the right layout for you, you can go to the top right corner and click the layout button. Here you can save your new layout. You can also set the layout back to default at any point. The point is to try things out and get comfortable.