as The_Neverending_Loop said, start simple and work your way up especially if you've never made a game before. Depending on which engine you choose to use, there may be built in support for some simple primitives like boxes, spheres etc. In that case you won't have to worry about creating and importing 3D meshes since you can use those primitives instead. Even with simple primitives you can makes games like Pong or tetris.

You can also check out Unreal Engine 4. They have a special student license so it will help you with learning without paying.

UE4 comes with a bunch of starter content and a bunch of documentation and tutorials, so you can literally place a textured cube into a game world in less than a minute. There are some nice video tutorials which go through how to build a house, step by step, and wire it up with blueprints to get some interactivity going (ie, push a button to open a door). No code required!

Hi,

My humble little opinion is that college or uni students should down scale their ambitions in game development until after graduation. While in school I would suggest a goal of a few simple 2D games. They can be easy on the art assets for the first few games. It is not unusual for a game developer to use placeholder art assets in the earlier stages of developing a game.

The important things to realize are this:

1) Do not try to reinvent the wheel. Game engines by themselves typically take a team years to develop. This does not include the games themselves which can take months or years. As for art assets, there are literally thousands of no cost or low cost 2D and 3D art assets available on many websites. Do not try in your early learning to make complicated coding libraries - found to take years to evolve in themselves. For example, there are already existing level editors, so no need to reinvent one for yourself in the early years. There are libraries for importing texture and model file formats, so no need to spend months on that area, too. Collision and physics libraries are available (such as Bullet Physics). Blender and other software (which can make 3D models) have some ability to convert file formats to the desired format, so no need to reinvent the wheel there, also. Collada animation is popular with some game engines, so look for animation applications such as within Collada which are available.

2) Choose a game engine and select a standard language (such as C#, Python, Java, C++, or one of dozens of others), since you have some few years of coding experience. (Beginners should almost never choose C++ which is too forgiving of bad coding habits.) Each game engine usually has a choice of a few languages and some have a native language unique to the engine which is similar to a standard language, which I advise to avoid unless you are committed to that game engine long term.

3) Make single player 2D games - simple ones - for a while. These can be as easy as only a few pages of coding to a hundred or more. Next make a few multiplayer 2D games.

4) Last couple stages of learning are creating single player 3D games (usually first person, such as FPS) and later a few multiplayer 3D games.

The more demanding that game dev gets, then the more need to assemble a team on each game, so keep that in mind long term and aim for standard technology so that other people can easily join your team to get to work right away at high level of productivity.

After college, the whole world of game dev will open to you!

Clinton

Where should you start? Posting here was a great fist step. Welcome to gamedev sir.

I realised that I need to know 3D modelling before starting with Unity

I'd like to correct this statement. No, you don't need to know 3D modelling before starting with Unity. You can build your own game objects out of primitives in the editor if you're going for a Minecraft look. Or, you can make use of the Unity Asset store to import 3D models into your game. Many of them are even free.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/category/0/page/1/sortby/price

Or you can use Unity to make 2D games without any 3d models at all.

3D models aren't the only thing in the Asset store either. There's sound effects, music, textures, code modules, etc. Most of which have decent free options as well.

The online tutorials are really slick too. Check it out.

- Eck

Beginners should almost never choose C++

This is terrible advice. Knowing Python, Unity, or Unreal won't get you a career in game dev. You need to learn C++, so start there. It's not too hard to learn as a beginner unless you're generally bad at programming anyway, in which case you won't end up in game dev either way.

Source: Myself - A software engineer for a game & simulation company with a degree in game development.