Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Walking The Walk (Cycle)


I'm using Unity for my current solo project. Here's why:

Price: The amateur version is free, which works for me since I'm using it to build a portfolio, if I decide to make the leap to commercial development it's only a few hundred bucks for the various mobile kits.

Portfolio Integration: I can build a game using the "webplayer" option, which spits out a folder, which I can then upload to my server, and then anyone with a browser who is willing to download the Unity plugin can play the game. Only Flash offers out of the box visibility with that much ease.

Scales to 3D: and here's where Flash falls down. If I move from 2D to 3D in six months or nine months, I don't want to have to learn an entirely new environment.

IDE for fools like me: The other day I was importing some bricks (the artistic masterpieces shown above) and they were showing up all blurry in game. I figured something was up in the texture pipeline, and started fooling around with checkboxes and drop-down menus. Within minutes, I had switched from bilinear to point filtering and the problem went away. I'm not even totally sure what those words mean, but I know that if my game consisted of a series of text files in Visual Studio I would probably still be working on this problem. There's no substitute for a savvy engine programmer on your team, but if you're a tyro working alone, a full-featured IDE that does some of the heavy lifting can be a lifesaver.

Extensions and Plug-ins: My current project uses RagePixel, a plugin that allows the user to draw and animate pixel art right there in the game engine editor. Unity is rife with various user-created tools like this, mostly free. The less time I have to spend re-inventing the wheel, the more time I can spend on gameplay.

Tribal Know-how and Tutorial Heaven: If you can think of something to do in Unity, chances are not only has someone else done it and left their code lying around online, it's likely enough that someone has created detailed step-by-step instructions on how they did it. I've seen tutorials on everything from vehicle physics to using normal maps to acheive 3D lighting effects on 2D pixels. The game I'm working on is ever so loosely based on a series of tutorials for a Mario clone provided gratis by the Walker Boys. After this project, I have my eye on some 3D RPG stuff over at Cooking With Unity. Top shelf virtual mentors are only a click away!

Resume: I keep a close watch on what companies are looking for in their game designers. Using a modern 3D IDE and scripting with C# are both employable skills, whereas Cocos2D stuff, for example, is a bit thin on the ground.

There are lots of great tools out there, and the mark of a true pro is the ability to switch between them and pick up new ones with ease, so I don't intend to lock myself into Unity at the expense of other stuff. Also, lots of tutorials are universally applicable; once you've learned how to implement character gravity in JavaScript and HTML5/Canvas, you've also learned how to do the same in just about any high-level scripting language.

There is of course the danger of becoming the guy who pounces on every bright shiny new thing, abandoning projects on a whim or worse, rebuilding the same unfinished game in engine after engine, and I am wary of that trap, but at the same tiem I'm pretty confident I'm on the right track for now. Even if I have to turn everything upside down next year, I know that as long as I'm learning, no time is lost and no effort is wasted.

2 comments:

  1. I had a similar issue with point vs linear sampling. It's not as hard to fix in Visual Studio as you imagine.
    http://deck16.net/post/28981970115

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