It took me really long to give Unity3D a chance. Even though I knew it would make a good job I always wanted to create my own framework based on jMonkeyEngine. Hey, I’m a coder… Actually I came quite far but still there were millions of issues. But now that I agreed to help students in creating games upcoming semester (e.g. with Unity3D) I have a better cause to neglect my programmer’s dislike about one of that all-in-one-babies. 
And first to say, still nothing can be done without scripting
Until now I worked thorugh the 3d and 2D Platform games and watched one “How to make a car game”-Tutorial:
http://unity3d.com/support/resources/tutorials/3d-platform-game.html
http://unity3d.com/support/resources/tutorials/2d-gameplay-tutorial
http://www.der-softwareentwickler-blog.de/2010/02/16/unity3d-tutorial-serie/
After working through all this three tutorials I felt ready to start with something on my own. I created a small world with some free to download models, my dummy animated guy and a nice terrain I modeled in Unity3d and painted on it with splatting-painting. I created the lightmap with blender which was only possible cause I found some cool scripts that let you export the scene and terrain as OBJ. The movement-script is made from scratch by me (therefore it is of this poor quality yet). Actually I found out that realtime-shadow is only possible with the Unity3D Pro versions so I had to be happy with the projected “Blob-Shadow” for now. I added a small Unity-based animation for the wind mill. Actually I’m not so sure about how the movment and MouseOrbit-Look around the Character should work. For now you steer the guy like that:
awsd or keys for movement
left-ctrl for running
space for jumping
mouse for looking around (mouse-wheel to zoom in and out)
Have a look here:
http://thomas.trocha.com/games/unity3d/first/firstunity.html
