So I got the unity indie about a month ago
I was making good process with the learning
so
I decided to move over to unity iphone basic
because I want to make a game for the iphone
I have no interest in making games for the mac just on the Iphone.
anywhy
I am really struggling with unity iphone
there is not one tutorial for unity iphone WTF
the examples are difficult to follow and the commenting is not that great on the code…
I wish the unity staff would realize were the money really is…
I’m sure the great majority of people that have come to unity over the last few months are here to build games for the iphone not for mac or any other platform
At this point
I don’t think I could recommend unity iphone to anyone
not until we get better ducumentation and a couple tutorials that show how to use unity iphone.
We hear you but are unfortunately juggling a lot of different things at the moment… the biggest one being the 2.5 launch. Hopefully after that we will have time to make a decent tutorial or two for Unity iPhone.
Out of curiosity, what would be your top 5 things a tutorial specific to Unity iPhone cover?
Top 5 for me would be something like 1st person camera movements, 3rd person character and cameras (count that as 2 different ones I guess) and something like item collection or building a basic car / aeroplane engine, it would help everyone make the beginning of a wide range of game ideas.
Yes, tutorials would be nice, but please understand that Unity developers are humans too (or are they?? )
I personally would like to see some simple 3D game tutorial showing step by step work flow involved creating 3D game with terrain, skybox, camera character movement etc, some simple physics.
At the moment you can find all this information bit by bit from various places, but it takes time.
@ gregorypierce- doing them internally makes more sense at the moment. We have a 4 person team dedicated to this now so tutorials will start rolling out shortly.
I have to say that I am equally disappointed that there is not even one tutorial on how to create a game for Unity iPhone! I have Unity Pro and just recently upgraded to also have Unity iPhone with hopes of converting the work I have already done with Unity Pro to Unity iPhone, but of course none of the scripts work on Unity iPhone!??? I thought that I was going to just continue using Unity Pro and then just select a different output in the build settings. I wasn’t expecting a totally separate app that isn’t compatible with Unity Pro. However, I do understand that developing this stuff is far from easy and that the Unity folks are always hard at work improving Unity. That said, my top five tutorial choices would be:
Third Person Platformer (similar to Lerpz), but for the iPhone.
Multi-touch tutorial on how to use multi-touch to control the game camera and zoom in/ out and pan around the scene as well as for GUI menu control.
FPS tutorial
Third Person Side Scroller with items to collect and purchase
I have to say I went through the 2d and 3d platformer tutorials and then had no problem moving over to unity iPhone. between the manual/script ref and the community I have found answers to all my questions so far.
I agree though for the need of tutorials, but for now the answers are out there you just have to look.
Sorry, folks, but I’ve got to come out in support of the Unity guys here. Maybe I’m looking at it from a different perspective (being a professional game designer\programmer\artist), but I think that Unity is so easy to use that either just following the documentation for Unity on the Mac, then using the search feature on this forum will get you everything you need to know.
Before anyone says it, yes, I’ve complained in the past about the lack of iPhone specific tutorials, but that was in a moment of weakness. You all need to remember that writing a game is all about being adaptable and working your way around the problems you come up against. If you can’t get around them, rethink the feature.
If there’s any question you can’t find the answer to, then ask it on here. This is a pretty lively forum, so more often than not you get answers pretty quick.
And don’t ever think that making games will be easy. It really isn’t! Even with the power and ease of use that Unity gives you, it takes a lot of effort and understanding of fundamental game systems before you’re going to produce anything of any worth. If you’re a complete N00B, don’t expect to be pumping out the next Zen Bound or Zombieville USA by the end of your first week - it just ISN’T going to happen. Commit to the long haul, and your efforts will eventually pay off.
If you really need iphone dedicated tutorials (ie the normal ones aren’t enough), ask yourself fair and square if you think you will be able to work with apples documentation and tools to ever deploy a game to the iphone and appstore, because you must work with their documentation, unity will not take away the whole work of building and debugging it with xcode if you get crash reports. also you need to read their documentation on optimization, restriction and best practices
thats all outside of unity
Unity is really peanuts to learn from the regular tutorials. the little iphone specific things (other than the optimization part suggested above) can be gotten to a high degree from the iphone examples.
Some documentation on how the examples work and why some of the decisions were made the way they were done might make sense naturally.
But you always have to keep in mind, that Unity iphone is not a “make me a cool iphone shooter” button application. This type of application will never exist.
iPhone development is a mix of hard development work, knowledge of the hardware and how it works, reading through apple documentations, an acceptable math background to do 3d development (Vector, Matrix, Trigonometry and the knowledge of how to work with quaternions), talent and dedication.
These things are not optional but requirements, you develop for a very restricted platform which automatically implies that you know how to work within constraints.
Desktop development is much simpler as the hardware is powerfull enough to compensate for crappy devs work
Let me share my experience as I’m relatively new to Unity environment.
The most difficult thing for me was to understand Unity workflow philosophy. I have C, Cpp, C#, Symbian C, Java, Delphi/Pascal experience, so for me making application has always been equal to coding, what is wrong here.
With Unity you do not need to care about pointers, memory (well…not exactly) etc, just create game object, drag a script with a single command on it and it’s already working as expected.
Starting from scenes with single objects all things become more clear and sample projects seem understandable.
Next you’ll get used to unity scripting reference and manuals, friendly community and responsive support. And after a month of extensive playing (depends on your skills thou) with all features you can start thinking of real project developing.
Be ready to change requirements and preplanned structure, postpone schedules as iPhone platform is pretty tricky to develop for, even thou Unity makes it as easy as possible (from mine point of view).
this is the only reason why i have been holding back on buying unity so far…i tried the trail versions and they are good but you will only get so far by yourself
That’s why we have dedicated demo team for demo producing and started massive campaign for docs improving
Hope you’ll change your mind with new release 8)
I’ve just started looking at the iPhone stuff, and have found it pretty painless so far.
Generally developing for iPhone is not the easiest thing in the world. Apples DRM stuff is a pain in the ass, and every new release of XCode seems to complicate matters.
Developing for platforms with less powerful cpus e.g phones, has always been a challenge, so the iPhone is pretty much par for the course.
All the demo’s I’ve tried so far seem to work OK, and even the FPS shooter tutorial, which was not built for iPhone looks like it stands a reasonable chance to working. (But I’ve current just started to port it to iPhone, and I need to add the movement controls from the warehouse demo etc)
Managed to get it to load after commenting out the complaints from the compiler and hid the menu. Sure would be helpful to have a tutorial about player controls right about now.
If you haven’t done, check out the sample game that comes with Unity iphone (in the shared folder) as well as the iphone example projects download in the resource folder.
They contain many of the possible input was to learn from and expand on them to create own ones.
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