Hi there everyone, I recently got the Unity3D application and am very fond of it.
My goal is to start developing apps for the iPhone, but here’s the problem:
I don’t want to spend the money right away on the iPhone license, a mac and the signing up for iPhone development at apple.com.
Would you recommend it to start developing with the free Unity3D version and when your game is pretty much finished getting the iPhone license and porting everything to iPhone? That way I would avoiding the risk of (again) investing in something of which you don’t know how it’s gonna end.
Or is there too much stuff I would have to change?
Help greatly appriceated, thanks.
a game can not be pretty much finished without an iphone dev license, a mac and unity iphone cause pretty much finished means that you ensured it runs and runs somewhere performant on the device and thats plain simply impossible without having it running on the hardware.
also, you can not test any kind of input handling without that.
I wouldn’t recommend using Unity Free. If you do, you will likely have stacks of re-work to do - especially if you’re new to unity iphone dev and are learning.
To be honest by trying to start with Unity Free you might find it takes you twice the development effort (or worse).
Of course if you are very skint and have stacks of time to spare go for Unity Free. Otherwise, if time is money (which to me it is) then get Unity iPhone - you’ll be glad you did.
Well, my first iPhone game was made this way. Porting from Unity to Unity iPhone only took me a couple of hours. I just had to replace my mouse controls with accelerometer controls and do some small optimizations and it worked.
Off course, the game I made was pretty simple. If you’re making something complex it’s not a good idea, but if you’re making something simple it could work out fine this way.
But you will only need a mac for app-store compiling, right? Developing (AND testing on your iDevice) works on a PC?
I don’t think you can test on the device from PC, you need Mac for this.
Unity iPhone works only on Mac, so how are you going to compile for iPhone?
To answer your original question - of course this is a good way to start especially if you’ve never developed games before.
Only one issue, if you are going to use accelerometer you won’t be able to test it.
No you can not do any iphone related development on pc. Even with Unity 3, the iphone target is OSX exclusive.
If you ever read the contract you signed with apple for iphone development, the question should technically not exist, as you would otherwise ask if unity supports you in breaking your contract
Well, I have developed games before, but only with C and I’m new to Unity. And I won’t need the accelerometer for the project I’m planning.
It’s just four onscreen buttons as controls, and a pretty simple movement behavior.
But hey, thanks for all your answers.
just keep in mind that Unity GUI (-> OnGUI) is not multitouch capable and you can’t test multitouch on the desktop either.
Oh, that’s no problem. Just for the record: The only controls I’ll require are 4 directional keys for which the 4 arrow keys on a desktop will be more than sufficient when it comes to testing. :]