Due to the Coronavirus outbreak, Unity is giving away 3 months of access to Unity Learn Premium, a vast repository of high-quality tutorials and courses to learn everything from coding to game design to art. If you've always dreamed of creating your own games and, like many of us, suddenly find yourself with a lot of spare time, this is the perfect opportunity to get started.

For those of you who may not be familiar with Unity, it is the most popular game engine, especially suited for small indie developers to create both 2D and 3D games, such as "Hollow Knight," "Escape From Tarkov," " Cuphead, and many other blockbusters. However, like any professional engine, it is hard to master.

This is where Unity Learn can be a great help. A website run by Unity Technologies, it offers hundreds of hours of professionally created video tutorials that delve into every aspect of game development. Most of these lessons are usually locked behind an additional subscription, Premium, but Unity Technologies is now offering them all for free for three months due to the coronavirus outbreak. The promotion lasts through June 20, and all you need to do to access it is register for a free account (you must register anyway if you want to download Unity).

As part of this agreement, Unity is also offering free access to Create with Code. This is essentially like taking a college course in game development, with live instruction to help you build your first game. If you can't make it to the live classes (the course started yesterday), you can catch up in an older course.

I encourage anyone interested to give it a shot. I started learning game development with Unity last summer and found it to be a very satisfying (and rewarding) hobby; while Unity is far from perfect, it is a good engine for beginners thanks to its comprehensive documentation and relatively accessible workflow.

If you decide to take the plunge, it can be hard to know where to start; Getting Started With Unity is a great place to start, and from there you can try beginner courses in both 2D and 3D Learning C# may seem like a daunting task, but programming is fun, and without it, what you can achieve with Unity is pretty limited. For a more comprehensive course on programming, this survival guide is a good place to start. From there, you can branch out into more specific topics depending on your interests.

If all of this is not your thing, I highly recommend purchasing Udemys' Complete C# Unity Developer 2D or Complete C# Unity Developer 3D. I started with the 2D course and it was the most intuitive Unity tutorial I've seen and taught me everything I needed to start building my own games. It's a lot of fun. Don't forget to buy it at Udemy's heavily discounted sale, not at full price.

Unity Learn Premium is free until June 20.