Hey Gang,
I have seen a lot of forum posts and posts over the net talking about how Unity is no good for “big” and “professional” PC games. I would like to dispel that myth,
Today, my first Unity game hit the stores in over 30 countries, being in nearly every store in every country that sells PC games. It is also about to be released in download format, through the major download services. You can also buy the box at retailers such as Amazon. On October 12, we ship the Mac version. The finally tally of countries will be much higher as the game is currently being localised into a large swathe of languages. After being displayed at various events by my publisher, it went viral, with retailers, distributors and publishing partners around the world looking to stock the game.
In 28 years of being in the games industry as a full time developer (I left school at 16 in 1984 to work on Commodore 64, Spectrum and Amstrad games ) to ending up at companies such as Atari and Bullfrog/EA with huge teams and even bigger budgets and nearly 20 chart games worked on, I feel that Unity has allowed the industry to come back full circle to small teams with creative ideas.
I have always enjoyed strategy and management games (hence being at Bullfrog in the footsteps of Peter Molyneux) and I wanted to do a family friendly circus management game - so “Circus World” was born. It is an A grade title, with huge amounts of assets.
There are 43 circus acts to hire, 18 animals, 80 cities to visit around the world, weather effects, multiple big tops to purchase, loads of sideshows, sideshow stock control and management, ticketing, travelling, bank loans, maintenance etc etc. It is a huge and intricate game. If you want some figures, it runs to just over 48,000 lines of code, there are over 600 character animations, 135 pop-up screens with which the player can interact, 71 unique circus visitor models, many hundreds of buildings and landscape models, about 10,000 words of text (localised to multiple languages). it is an enormous game, easily comparible with games I have worked on in the past with an enormous team.
So how many developers wrote Circus World. Well actually all the coding was done by myself and all the art by Gary Ward (who many of you will know from Impressions games and their line of RTS’s). The whole thing was just the two of us start to finish in terms of development, every line of code every asset. The first time I had ever used Unity, my first exposure to C#. Just the two of us, Unity Pro and the asset server, with the only third party product being Brady Wright’s really useful EZ Gamesaver plug-in. No technical support, no contact with the Unity team. Just Gary and I in isolation (along with a production manager at our publisher, Edward Grabowski, also originally at Impressions feeding in gameplay ideas)
Yet, we are now on the shelves, published by the largest simulation publisher in the world (under the Excalibur label in the UK - the publisher behind the platinum selling Euro Truck Simulator, the platinum Farming Simulator and scores of other titles) - available in other countries under the labels of publishing partners. It has shelf space in everywhere from Walmart, to supermarkets, to gaming multiples to independent stores. So really when people say you cannot sit with the “big boys” on the shelves, with Unity you can! To misquote that guy in the USA - as Unity developers Yes we can!
Is Unity a panacea for all coding needs? Far from it, and don’t even get me started on the GUI :). Are there bugs, sure there are. Things I would like the team to have done differently? Oh yes. All that said, with careful thought, planning and thinking outside of the box there is a workaround for everything. There are no brick walls, only challenges to be overcome. You know, in over 30 games, I have yet to make one without some challenges. That is the nature of the business and why I do this and not boring spreadsheets for a living 
I would rather dance on hot coals in my little frilly socks than write another 3D engine. Unity just relieved me of that chore from day 1, along with a fantastic workflow (I just got Unity VS this week to integrate in to Visual Studio, to fix another stumbling block)
Having just gone through the process, start to finish with a major project, I really can say that with Unity you CAN make a major release game, of the scope and complexity limited only by your imagination.
Thank you Unity Team! What next for myself and Gary? Well, we are having the weekend off and start our next Unity title on Monday!
PS You can see info on the game here. Please note the video is pre-alpha, so the finished game is much more polished
all the best to everyone,
Jane W
