Having heard that the Unity game engine is now being offered for free, I figured I would be a fool not to take advantage and give it a go. As such, I spent a little time working through tutorials, playing with various features and starting a small game project.
I figured as a quick introduction I would work on a clone of Rotation, an Asteroids/Duo/Space Invaders sort of game which I created in Flash a couple of years ago.
Overall things went (slightly surprisingly) very smoothly. Initially I had to cling the script reference but once I had a better idea of the functionality available, everything started to come together. I don’t have much experience with comprehensive game engines like this, but Unity certainly seemed to provide far fewer “Why on earth was it designed like that?” moments than I’ve experienced in the past; it also took far less time to get a general overview of in the first place. I can already see how this tool could be useful for quick gameplay mock-ups as well as complete, commercial products. Continue reading »