Unity is quickly becoming the standard game engine for learning to develop games, virtual reality, and augmented reality applications. Now it is quickly becoming the standard platform for developing AI and ML applications as well, partly due to the excellent reinforcement learning platform the team at Unity has built. This Unity ML platform is a key component in our desire to use the tool, since it currently is at the cutting edge of advanced AI for games.

Installing Unity is quite straightforward, but we want to make sure we get the installation just right the first time. Therefore, follow these steps to install a version of Unity on your system:

1. Navigate your browser to https://store.unity.com/download and accept the terms, and then download the Unity Download Assistant. This is the tool that downloads and installs the pieces we need.

2. Run the Download Assistant and select the following minimum components to install, as shown in the dialog as follows:

3. Just be sure to install the latest version of Unity and select the components that match your preferred OS, as shown in the preceding screenshot. You may, of course, select other components at your discretion, but those are the minimum you will need for this book.
4. Next, set the path to install Unity to a well-known folder. A good choice is to set the folder name equal to the version. This allows you to have multiple versions of Unity on the same system that you can easily find. The following screenshot shows how you may do this on Windows:

5. Those are the only critical parts to the installation and you can continue installing the software using the defaults.
6. Launch the Unity editor after it installs and you will be prompted to log in. Unity requires you to have an account, regardless of whether you are using the free version. Go back to unity.com and just create an account. After you are done setting up the account, go back in and log in to the editor.
7. After you log in, create a empty project called Chatbot and let the editor open to a blank scene. 

Unity is a full-featured game engine and may be intimidating if this is your first visit. There are plenty of online tutorials and videos that can get you up to speed on the interface. We will do our best to demonstrate concepts simply, but if you get lost, just take your time and work through the exercise a few times.

With Unity installed, we now have to install the components or assets that will allow us to easily connect to the chatbot server we just created. In the next section, we install the AMQP asset for Unity.