I have thought several times over the years about Unity and wondered if perhaps it makes game dev more difficult than it should be.
Part of this is based on my own experience working with it although admittedly that was almost certainly due to not “getting it” and attempting to throw all Unity specific stuff out and use as if it was just a more straightforward api to load, play and render content.
Part of it is due to seeing many people around here working in Unity for years (and they seem to possess plenty of skill too) and yet they have completed no games (not even a tiny super simple game) as far as I know.
Yet I have also seen newbies come in and make their first (usually Mobile) game in less than a month.
I do think the whole “getting it” thing plays a major factor here. If a person really “connects” with Unity they will likely complete a game fairly quickly. If they don’t truly connect with it well it seems likely they may never complete a game with it.
What is your view? Let’s say you can use up to $100 worth of stuff from the asset store. Would you be able to complete a FPS with the scope of something like the old Wolfenstein 3D? If yes how long do you think it would take you? Again the key here is could you COMPLETE the game… not START the game or create a scene, etc.
Modern gamer expectations and the impact that has on the developer makes game development too hard. Players have come to expect certain things from certain genres and now the developer has to bring those to the table in addition to any of the features they wanted to introduce to the game.
That said I don’t believe Unity is blameless. It’s making life more difficult but only because some of the functionality it has is seriously subpar and requires the developer to build their own solutions. Two quick examples would be the Input API and the terrain system. We’ve been promised replacements but many people need them now.
Thanks for sharing! Let me ask you… you have been playing around with Unity for quiite a long time. Can you complete a clone of Wolfenstein 3D? And if so how long do you think it would take you (again you can use up to $100 worth of store assets)?
How much of a clone would it have to be? Would you expect it to have the same overall feel? Because I’m almost entirely just a programmer. I have very little artistic knowledge and the same applies to level designing. You’d be getting a prototype very similar to the one @Arowx made a while back.
I could complete something with the scope of the old Wolf 3D without spending a dime. I figure that a complete clone would take about a month considering I’d have to make sixty levels more than anything. I imagine I could hack together some procgen that could make the levels for me and save some time but that’d be going a bit beyond the project’s scope.
That $100 was with that in mind. It doesn’t have to look exact or anything like that. It just has to be the game itself. The play experience. The theme, etc. If you have to get aliens instead of Nazis so be it. And by complete I mean the entire game.
Reason I chose this game is because this is one of the oldest FPS games so it would seem like if people have any hope of making any semblance of a more modern FPS they should be able to make W3D. Maybe that logic is flawed but is how I am viewing it.
A month or two for the core. Probably six months to release.
The 2D-3D hybrid would probably be the most technically challanging, as it’s an archaic technique not directly supported by Unity.
And I personally wouldn’t bother with the asset store for this one. The time taken to find, evaluate, intergrating and tweak any asset would probably be longer then the time taken to build the specific system.
I like that approach. I find the non visual dev appoach and being one with the code very simple. Not building a 3D engine. That would be silly in this age. Of course, there are pros and cons to everything. But mainly it seems to be a commonly held belief that Unity makes game dev very easy. If so it seems like every person who has messed with Unity for many months should be able to make a game along the lines of one created 25 years ago.
Nah, the levels are simple tile maps, and since they’re easily found on the internet, recreating them would take probably 10 minutes or so for each level. (I’d use my own SpriteTile for this and modify the code to produce 3D levels instead of 2D.) I’m going to say a couple of weeks for the whole thing.
I suppose it’ll take me a month or two to create something like that for me, and I believe it could be a testimonial to the conveniency of the platform, or the usefulness of Asset Store, since I only started writing games early this year.
If I don’t have to create too many levels then probably I can just buy some good FPS template with something like Rewire, and maybe some other items which might make doing the UI and decals easier, then just write quick dirty scripts to glue them all together.
I think a seasoned Unity developer would probably need only couple of weeks rather than months, but I’m still learning the platform, so I expect to do more trial and errors.
For me, it’s been more a problem of getting used to the way it’s supposed to do in Unity, as many of such practices seem to be at odds with my instincts as a programmer, but I have no doubts that they help immensely in making game development so much easier, especially for those who don’t have much experience in programming.
Probably, the recent surge of indie developers who have been churning out 10+ new games every month on Steam might be a sufficient proof for that.
Oh, I know. I was just operating under the assumption that since this game is a clone and not a direct reproduction that I’d have to make original levels.
Seasoned Unity developers have frameworks they’ve written over the years too. Being able to start from a common framework can save a great deal of time over someone who has to write theirs from scratch.
Unity3d basically shaves off a few years from development time. Basically, without the engine, a user will typically struggle several years with C++ programming, and maybe write a demo that will be missing 99% of ease of use provided by unity editor.
Chances are they’ll learn how to make engines, without releasing a single name in process.
I think I mentioned this before… but with unity it is possible to make a 3d action game prototype in less than a day. Without unity it ain’t happening (at least I won’t believe it till I see it).
Youtube link appears to be either dead or private.
I think the whole wolfenstein can be recreated by a lone developer in less than three months if someone funding development. That’s without ever buying anything from asset store.
That approach is suicide for anything serious, IMO. Or a “not invented here” syndrome.
I spent tremendous amount of time dealing with C++ and various internal engine aspects, by now I wish I spent that time doing something else.
Low poly 3d instead of sprites will increase development time. Because skeletal animation.
Either way a lot of people (including me) would have no problem recreating the whole game from scratch in unity without buying anything on asset store … as long as someone is willing to pay for development time.
If anything I think from a big-picture industry-perspective Unity has made it too easy, but in all the wrong areas because making good games is still hard as hell. It has never been easier to get terrible games out into the wild, that’s not good for the market imho.
I don’t think I could ever find the motivation to do a super tiny simple game, because I couldn’t get excited about it and wouldn’t have the motivation to work on it at all. I’d rather experiment with lighting setups or build a complex terrain shader from scratch in Shaderforge for the third time.
I might never finish my own game because I’m terrible at managing scope, but just a few weeks ago I took a weekend to read up on multi-threading basics and put a part of my pathfinding into a separate thread and that gave a huge performance boost. This was a really cool experience because it was the first time I ever coded something threaded and it worked like a charm. It’ll likely solve a lot of problems I had with my pathfinding method, because I now need to worry a lot less about how long my calculations take. I wouldn’t trade that for having finished a super simple game instead, because I wouldn’t be able to be proud of a super simple game.
