One day I saw a webpage which had some game, and wanted me to download the Unity web player plugin for my browser.
I thought “What crap is this? I’m not going to install it!”. That was stupid, because Unity rocks as a game development tool!
Why Unity rocks (in my opinion)
In a matter of a few hours, I wrote a third person shooter prototype.
Of course, this was after I spent some days to get familiar with the environment.
The basic features my game had in about 8 or so hours:
- 3D 3rd person “over the shoulder” camera
- Enemies who moved around
- The enemies could smartly aim at your current location
- A spawner system where I could place a spawner object anywhere and it would automatically spawn more enemies
- A waypoint based movement system
- A simple user interface which displayed health and some other stuff
What is Unity?
Unity is basically a game engine with an IDE sort of editor tool. It can be used to develop games for multiple platforms and the web (which uses their browser plugin).
It has a fast 3D engine, a PhysX based physics engine and libraries to work with all sorts of things you might need when developing a game (GUI, collisions, even multiplayer is quite straightforward to do).
The editor itself is kind of like a level editor for a 3D game – think Valve Hammer or WorldCraft – but it also has an asset list, scenes, input management etc. quite easily straight from the UI.
Oh, and did I mention it also works on Macs and not just Windows, and that you can write scripts for your game in JavaScript, C# or Boo?
If you develop games, for fun or for profit, Unity is worth checking out
Now I’m not very familiar with other 3D game engines, but Unity is the best I’ve seen. It does require some getting used to, especially how the scripts are attached into the game, but I can’t really think of many bad things about it.
ps: I’m not going to attach a screenshot of my game because it’s basically just a bunch of boxes. I’m not a 3D modeller, sorry ;)