If you’ve been following us for some time, you’ll know that we use the amazing Unity engine for all our current projects. Unity combines an editor, Mono scripting and the ability to deploy to a lot of different platforms: PC, Mac, the Web, Wii, and iPhone. (and I hear they’re working on adding support for more consoles soon) Up until now, the Unity editor was only available for OSX. This suited Chris and I just fine, because we prefer working on Macs. But now Unity has been released for PC and this is great news for all indie developers.
The development environment for Unity features a very clever design that adheres to two crucial principles: simplicity and flexibility. Its ridiculously easy to import resources, write and prototype gameplay and put together a great experience without having to worry about niggling technical details. For an example: we put together Paper Moon in 9 days!
This is coming from someone who built his own engine from the ground up (for Aquaria) who has deep fears and suspicions towards game making tools. Many of them are severely limited and force you to do things in a retarded way. It turns out Unity is actually very flexible and easy to understand. While it might not be the best choice for every game, it has a lot of freedom.
One of my worst experiences was buying the Torque3D engine a few years ago. You were basically stuck making an FPS-style game unless you tore everything apart and put it back together. Unity starts you off with a blank canvas and lets you build whatever you want, which is a very positive experience.
Another significant indie team that uses Unity for all their projects is Flash Bang. They’ve even created a website exclusively for Unity web games called Blurst. (pssst… we’re going to make a blurst game sometime in the future!)
If you haven’t taken the time to check out Unity yet, now is definitely the time.
You can find all the information at Unity3d.com.
For a great intro to Unity’s editor and code, look no further than Blurst’s tech blog.
The result of our efforts are random crashing and rampant frustration. The solution: remove and compress?
