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.
Derek wrote a Comment on March 18, 2009 at 11:39 am
I never played Minotaur China Shop but I sure busted a gut watching the Preview video a while back.
Alec Holowka wrote a Comment on March 18, 2009 at 11:42 am
Its a pretty fun game! And Blush is just sexy.
Christopher Lobay wrote a Comment on March 18, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Blush IS sexy. Mad sexy even. On a separate note, I designed the logo for a club called Blush once.
JacaByte wrote a Comment on March 18, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Dang, the games have issues with Chrome…
Alec Holowka wrote a Comment on March 18, 2009 at 11:09 pm
Yeah, Unity web player isn’t supported on Chrome yet. Which sucks, ’cause I love me some Chrome. But I also love me some Firefox, so it works out alright.
Christopher Lobay wrote a Comment on March 18, 2009 at 11:32 pm
For the record, Unity also lacks support in the new Safari 4 Beta. Which stinks.
Aras Pranckevicius wrote a Comment on March 19, 2009 at 3:13 am
For the record, Unity 2.5 web player does support Chrome (stable version, at least). Last time I checked, the “dev” Chrome channel had tons of problems with plugins in general, so it might just be that (unstable version of) Chrome has some bugs.
Alec Holowka wrote a Comment on March 19, 2009 at 3:30 am
Sweet!
Aaron wrote a Comment on March 19, 2009 at 7:57 am
Wait wait wait. Does that mean I can use Unity, on my Windows PC, to develop for the iPhone?
If so, my life just changed.
Aaron wrote a Comment on March 19, 2009 at 8:15 am
Hmm… “Unity iPhone is available on Mac OS X only.”
I knew it was too much to ask, since Unity iPhone is essentially a bridge between Unity and XCode, right?
Still, this means that I could develop on Windows and just send it over to the Mac to do the iPhone compiling.
Alec Holowka wrote a Comment on March 19, 2009 at 4:11 pm
You are correct, XCode/iPhone stuff is OSX only.
Sharing a project between Unity 2.1 and Unity iPhone (which are separate apps) can get a little weird in places. Not sure if this is improved in 2.5 yet. (I imagine it probably is)
Still it was workable in 2.1, just sometimes annoying.
feessyidorits wrote a Comment on May 2, 2009 at 1:03 am
Hi everyone
Don’t buy or sell sitewide links for serps
Instead, pick a whole range of keyword phrases that have less or little competition.
regardless of what’s on the horizon, Google is the major deliver of the web’s traffic.
Try viral products like ebooks, reports and free software programs to get your links out into the marketplace.
I have no hesitation in recommending goowall.com promotion service to other potential clients.