New ambition: make a game with dinosaurs that doesnt suck...I have many scenarios already planned out...and it steers away from guns. Anyway do Unreal is better off for shooters, but Unity is easier to start off with? Just learned te GUI of Unity and needed a text editor to start scripting. Or do I not need one?

Unity does have a script editor built-in, MonoDevelop, but it's missing a few nice features to have, so I personally switched to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Pro, which I got for free being a student. I believe you can get Visual Studio Express for free student-or-not though, if you prefer it over MonoDevelop. I'm programming in C# on a Windows platform, tho. If you're using JavaScript/UnityScript, you might be better off just using MonoDevelop.

The Unify Community website does list some recommended editors, too, but honestly... it's just personal preference:

http://www.unifycommunity.com/wiki/index.php?title=Script_Editors

Unity all the way. Just because games like batman and gears of war where made with unreal doesn't mean it's the best for us noobs to start using. Unity has tons of tutorials. A great community, Awesome documentation, assets to get your game rolling, Not to mention it supports c# which is a great language to start with, And is soo easy to port to other platforms its retarded so head over to the walker boy studio website right now and start learning.http://www.walkerboystudio.com/html/unity_training___free__.html

What exactly will I have to use with Unity? So I can use monodevelop but what about middleware? Or 3ds max/ maya will I need any of those, or whatever would be helpful for Unity? And how does one upload art for a game in unity?

[quote name='Chris941' timestamp='1340450837' post='4951977']
What exactly will I have to use with Unity? So I can use monodevelop but what about middleware? Or 3ds max/ maya will I need any of those, or whatever would be helpful for Unity? And how does one upload art for a game in unity?

Any 3d modeller that can export to .FBX, .dae, .3DS, .dxf or .obj works, on the Unity website the following are listed as supported:
Maya, Cinema 4D, 3ds Max, Cheetah3D, Modo, Lightwave, Blender. (Allthough other tools will work aswell), FBX is probably the best format to export/import as since it includes everything, (some of the other formats can only store static or keyframe animated meshes for example)
for texture creation you can use tools like gimp, paint.net, photoshop, paintshop pro, ms paint, etc. (Any tool that can create/modify 2 dimensional images works here)
for sound/music anything goes aswell, Audacity is fairly popular(for sound effects atleast) but the built in sound recorder in windows work aswell (Supported formats are ogg, mpeg(1/2/3) wav, aiff, mod, it, s3m, xm) (for good music apps you'd have to ask a composer, allthough something like fasttracker might work for you (its fairly easy to use)
You cannot add any middleware to Unity Free (you need the pro version to do that), most of what you need should be included allready though.

To add art assets to your game you just have to click the assets menu and select import assets.

Oh, and Unity 4 will be released soon (i just got my pre-order discount offer from them)(it adds quite alot of nice things)
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Thank you for the info Simon! i will remember that!

Now, one big question as i start out, i need the proper mindset. And that question of how to create this always comes to mind, and i start thinking of things that could happen hours into the game or towards the ending. So my question is, what is the proper mindset? what should you do first when creating a game? what about cinematics? menus? scenes act as levels right? so should i start with terrain, skybox, creating buildings? When AAA-like game developers start a project, what is the first thing to do? do they start drawing up levels and such? or storyboards or what? If i can understand what i should start out with, i can actually begin. Right now i'm looking over the scripting tutorial on Unity, will have to print that out.

I can read the manual, print out tutorials and work my way around learning a few things in a few days, but i'm just not sure exactly how to start for the game.

Make a concept of the kind of game you want to make, like genre, perspective and so on, and then pick the most important mechanic or the most important aspect of the game and start there. Make a small prototype containing only the needed features and make that work.
For a platformer that would be displaying some placeholder platforms and a placeholder character and let it jump from platform to platform.
After you are satisfied with that aspect start adding new features but always test them out before adding new ones.

In projects I worked with we always started with a bare prototype, in one case we even made a paper prototype before even starting the computer. Things like menues and HUDs always came later unless they were necessary for the prototype to work.