7 Best Programming Languages for Unity Game Development

Unity is a game engine for developing video games, as well as a variety of other applications and interactive 3D content.

Unity can be used to develop 3D and 2D games for desktops, the web, smartphones, consoles, and VR/AR headsets.

Unity was originally developed by the company Over the Edge in Denmark and published by Metabyte in 1997. In 2004, Unity Technologies acquired Over The Edge.

It went on to win an Academy Award for Technical Achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2009.

Unity is a cross-platform development engine with the ability to deploy to 16 different platforms. Developers can use Unity to build games in C#, C++ and JavaScript.

Unity was designed to be extensible (more about this later) and it has an asset store for selling or freely distributing self-published work including models, textures, scripts, sound effects, advanced middleware integrations (e.g. PhysX by nVidia), and full-featured asset packages like trees, buildings, characters, etc.

The engine can handle 2D games created with sprites or 3D games using polygonal meshes, point clouds, volumetric clouds, particle systems and subdivision surfaces.

We have shortlisted some of the best Programming Languages for Unity Game Development for you.

Best Programming Languages for Unity Game Development

1. C#

C# is an object-oriented programming language developed by Microsoft within its .NET initiative and later approved as a standard by the ECMA.

It has many similarities to C++ but also has some major differences, including Support for modern memory management techniques, Support for data abstraction, Support for exception handling.

Unity is a native C++-based game engine.

2. JavaScript

JavaScript is a programming language used for client-side web development. It has been created to make the Internet more interactive and dynamic.

JavaScript started off as a browser-based language but later, programmers began to use it in many other different types of applications.

One of the main benefits of JavaScript is that it can be adapted to run on any platform, which means that it can be ported across different devices including PCs, smartphones, and tablets.

In order to program in JavaScript, programmers must know HTML and CSS because JavaScript relies heavily on these two languages to interact with the user’s browser page.

One of the most popular uses of JavaScript is for animating effects on websites like motion graphics or scrolling text. This is because animation brings websites to life and makes them more appealing for visitors.

3. C and C++

C++ is actually an extension of the C programming language. It was developed in the early 1980s by Bjarne Stroustrup, who was trying to add object-oriented programming classes to C. Thus the name ‘C with Classes’.

Even though C++ has grown to be quite popular (and required knowledge for many programming jobs), it still remains one of the most misunderstood languages, largely thanks to its massive learning curve.

C++ is a good choice for game development. There are many libraries and programs built on top of it. Not to mention, some games themselves are created in C++.

It is also more efficient, as some other languages aren’t as fast as it can be. Other languages like C# are slower than C++.

However, that does not mean that it is always the language you should use for your game engine. It’s advised to see what you think would be best to make a game with.

4. Boo

Boo is an object-oriented statically typed, general purpose programming language that uses a Python-inspired syntax with a focus on language and compiler extension to take use of the Common Language Infrastructure’s support for Unicode, internationalization, and web applications.

Type inference, generators, multimethods, optional duck typing, macros, true closures, currying, and first-class functions are some of the features of note.

Boo was one of three scripting languages for the Unity game engine until it was discontinued in 2014 owing to its limited userbase (Unity Technologies employed De Oliveira, its creator).

Despite the fact that official support for Boo has ended, the language can still be used in Unity until the Boo compiler is retired in 2017.

5. Lua

Lua is a programming language designed to be simple and easy to use.

It is a cross-platform, multi-paradigm, lightweight programming language developed primarily for use in embedded systems.

Lua was created in 1993 as a language for expanding software systems in order to fulfil the then-growing need for customization.

It included all of the fundamental characteristics of most procedural programming languages, but none of the more sophisticated or domain-specific features; instead, it had methods for expanding the language, allowing programmers to add them.

Lua’s designers concentrated on enhancing its speed, portability, extensibility, and ease-of-use in development because it was meant to be a generic embeddable extension language.

Lua is frequently utilized as a scripting language by programmers in video game creation, owing to its apparent ease of embedding, speed of execution, and low learning curve.

Roblox is a well-known gaming platform that uses its own dialect, Luau, for scripting fast game production. Another game that employs a scaled-down version of Lua is World of Warcraft.

The language was designed to provide the speed of a scripting language with Lisp’s flexibility, especially in working with strings and arrays.

Lua also offers an efficient way to do some things which would otherwise implement slower than desired, such as handling large numbers.

Lua is still used as a scripting language by World of Warcraft and many other games.

6. IronPython

IronPython is a Python programming language implementation for the.NET Framework and Mono.

Python Tools for Visual Studio, a free and open-source plugin for Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE, may be used to implement it.

IronPython is fully written in C#, however some of its code is created automatically by a Python code generator.

The major objective of IronPython is to introduce Python to the.NET platform. IronPython is a command-line interface for Python scripting (.NET libraries, Windows Forms, WPF). Silverlight, mobile apps, and other CLI-based applications may all benefit from IronPython.