This post was published 2 years 3 months 6 days ago and as such probably does not reflect my current opinions, knowledge or ability.
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.
So do I wish Unity had been a possibility when we worked on Some Assembly Required last year? I’m not sure. In some ways, I think it perhaps makes things too easy when it comes to games programming as a learning experience. Sure, there are a lot of great features and we almost certainly could have created a more complete game in the short time we had available, but at the same time we wouldn’t have learned about using and integrating 3rd party libraries, structuring the application overall or converting and importing troublesome assets.
That’s also a reason I’m hesitant to keep working on this project – I’m not sure I’m getting as much from it as I could by tackling something more technical or in a different language. We’ll see what time permits though, as working on a game to completion is obviously a challenging exercise in itself and it seems possible that having the engine there would allow me to focus on difficult problems while the other stuff is taken care of.
Since I’m not terribly sure this project will make it any further though (I do have an honours project to take care of, amongst other things), here’s the little segment I’ve completed so far:
- You’ll need the Unity Web Player.
- Use left and right arrows to rotate your ships.
- Use space to shoot the cubes (asteroids. Probably thrown through space by bugs we’re at war with on some distant planet)
Anyway, if you’ve given Unity a try leave a comment below and let me know your experiences!