So, you've downloaded and cracked the seal on a fresh copy of Unity. You've seen some examples of what other people have done with the game engine, and you've taken a whirlwind tour of the interface. You can clear out the Island Demo project by clicking on File | New Project in the menu. After choosing a folder for the new project, Unity may close down completely and start up again. Once it does, you're left staring at a 3D plane.
This plane stretches on forever in all directions seemingly infinitely to either side of you, ahead of you, behind you, straight down to the deepest depths, and straight up to the sky. It's time to build a game, right? But how do you start? Where do you start?
The idea's the thing. Every game starts with an idea that little lightbulb above your head that flicks on all of a sudden and makes you say "aha!" If you've gone as far as picking up a book on Unity, you probably have at least one game idea floating around in your noggin. If you're like me, you really have 10,000 game ideas floating around in your head, all clamoring for your attention. "Build me! Build me!" Which of these ideas should you go ahead with?
The quality that defines a successful game developer is not the number of ideas he has. The guy with ten game ideas is equally as valuable as the girl with 500 game ideas. They're both essentially worthless! A game developer develops games. The one thing that separates you from success is not the number of ideas you've had or the number of projects you've started and abandoned, it's the games you've finished that count. To put it another way: he who executes, wins. Don't worry about getting it right just yet; worry about getting it done.
And what's with all this pressure to make your first game good, anyway? Before he directed Titanic and Avatar, James Cameron worked on the sequel to Piranha a zero-budget, B-movie schlockfest about murderous flying fish. Don't worry, you'll be the game world's answer to Cameron some day. But for now, let's finish the fish.