Wow, you have come a long way having made your first 2D simple game with the Unity engine. That's a great basis to making more games with more complex game mechanics.
Let's take a quick review of the things that were taught in this course:
Unity is one of the most popular game engines to make games with. It uses the C# programming language, and Unity's own website offers tutorials for beginners and more experienced game developers.
At the beginning of the exercise, you installed Unity and set up a project. You were guided through adding assets into the scene and setting colliders to them. Colliders prevent the assets from going through each other.
A simple game really doesn't need complex code to work as you learned while making the character move with the scripts. And of course, finally, it was time to build the game and try it out.
Game publishing is commonly divided into two categories, traditional and indie publishing. Bigger game studios usually a publisher dealing with marketing and distribution.
Either way the game company decides to go isn't the wrong way. Both of them have their ups and downs. Some companies might have even tried both ways, it all just depends on the need of the company.
The traditional way of publishing games through companies that are specialized in marketing, distributing, and publishing games. Even during the game development, the publisher can support the game developers financially, but that often means that the publisher can request changes to the games.
So, you will have professionals helping with everything that might not be your forte, but an outside party can also force some changes to your game.
Publishing games independently has become a popular route, especially for indie games companies. However, this way of publishing demands knowledge from publishing platforms and marketing. On the other hand, the publisher can't demand any changes made to the game.
Basically, you have the freedom and decisions all for yourself, but the workload is greater without any help from the outside.
The last step for game development is publishing the game. These days it's quite easy to release any game on digital marketplaces, like Steam or Itch.io. During the "Releasing Your Game"lesson you were guided through releasing your game to the public.
Itch.io is a free platform and easy to use. Releasing your game just takes a few minutes, and the platform is a great place to get feedback. Feedback from outsiders can bring new aspects that help the beginning game developers.