Hoping for the best - Unity questions.

Unity Engine
1

Hello people.
First of all, i am terrible sorry for my grammar and spelling mistakes/errors. You must somehow endure all that if you wish to read this wall of text i am about to create right now.

You see, english is not my native. Actualy, i never even had any kind of english language teachings or classes. All my english knowledge comes directly from manga and anime, satelite TV, internet and games. Those were my only tutors. You know what they say: “Throw a pig into chickens den and soon she’ll lay eggs”… or something (i actualy just made that up but i hope you get the point).

Well, so as we are officialy after this warning for all those grammar-nazi out there, i can propably get to the point.
You see, from like 16 years, or even more, i am gamer. And i very devoted one i might say. Ive played bazilion of games, and so with the time my taste grown solid and delicate.
Call me an old gaming fart but most of todays games i find missing something… The linearity, lack of challanges goals, games becoming more and more like a semi-interactive movies raher then games, poor story, “dead” game world, unfinished content … i can go all night long with this. Perhaps some of you would agree with me, perhaps not.
Either way, looking for a new game ive found myself in a dead end. After so many years, i really know what i like and what i dislike, i know how things should be executed in order to make the player happy, and i perfectly know how the game developer can totaly ruin his creation and my day when i attempt to play his baby.
Ive searched and searched and found nothing that 100% fits my tastes. Then i come to a very dangerous but brave conclusions…
“If i want to play a game with all the goodies that i love and long for, i must create it myself”.
You dont know me, if you would - you’ll know how such sentence is my words can be near to impossible to accomplish. You see, i have no talent, skills or proper education - in programing. And i never had, and never will. With Wife, kids, LIFE, i have left that golden point when i could waste my time on learning such things like programing. i have left it long ago. I dont have my past open mind, or the time, or the focus.

So i started looking for a “tools” that perhaps will enable me to create games without making my brain splatter al over the place. I have found RPG Maker serie. And iwas delighted… till the point when i realised how limited and badly writen it is. So i switched to Construct, which is very smiliar to Multimedia Fussion 2 software. The engine is great… as long as you want to make a plain game. When ou aim for something more complex then pac-man, this is where the learning curve becomes very steep. Not because its so hard to code or organise. But because the engine is quite unforgivining. And suddenly, a very lain game eats 2giga of VRAM, or make you CPU freeze, or the engine just crashes on you. You always know something went wrong, but figuring out WHAT went wrong can take ages. At least for a non-programer, who is not used to programing way of thinking. So instead of actualy MAKING that damn game, you waste your time on neverending debugging your creation. Dont get me wrong, i am aware that such things like bugs and flowbreak are unavoidable. But i like when the game creating softwere designed for non-programers would also take into account the simple mistakes a non-programer might do.

Then ive heard about Unity. To quote some people… “Unity is as artist friendly as it can be”.
Sounds nice but life has teached me that bigger the words are - the more are they empty. But i decided to come over here and face the truth, whatever it may be.

What game i want to make? Actualy i already started and had switched engines twice. So far i am working on it from 4 months.
Its a very weird mixture of Space Exploration and Space sim.
You walk around your ship in 2D side scroling/adventure game style.
You fly around in space and planets in style of Starscape or just topdown.
You move around planets surface in isometric/topdown view mix
You fight other ships and creatures in 2d side view.

So yea, at this point it should be obvious - i am aiming for a 2d, maybe 2.5d game.

And i am a terrible sucker in terms of programing. I am a descent writer, not that bad graphic artist. My talents are a totlay diffrent nature then numbers, codes or scripts. But i am also not that stupid. And if the reward is high enough i will try too climb the hill of learning Unity. But i cant do it alone.

So to cut the chase:

  1. How artist-friendly is Unity compared to GameMaker/Construct/RPG Maker and other prototyping tools?
  2. Can i make a 2d game in Unity without touching the 3d part?
  3. Does it supports instance looping think: looped coridor)
  4. Is it able to play video files from ingame as a part of the scenery? (think: AVI object displayed on ingame wall)
  5. How gentle Unity is for a non-programer? (think: cutting the codding proces so the artist cannot make too many too crusial errors and find himself in deep butthhole)
  6. Assuming that when i was young i was hit in the head and also i have a brain tumor - how long it will take me to learn Unity?
  7. Is there some kind of video tutorials for Unity but NOT hosted over here in that retarded Quicktime? (which, as a side note, does not play on my PC)

Optional 8.
Is there someone, brave or stupid enough to take care of me and be my tutor in world of Unity at least until ill grasp what-go-where?
(i am aware how naive the last request/question is. But then again, asking doesnt cost. at worst - ill just hear “No”)

as for people that might be interested about my game i have some tasty links for you:

My section over SpaceSimCentral http://www.spacesimcentral.com/hidden-space-f63/
my near-dead dev blog http://hiddenspace.blog.com/
Beta game intro http://www.viddler.com/explore/irbis/videos/1/

as you see, i am not a profesional. in roots, i am just a gamer who tries to deliver something that the game developers wouldnt.

Best Regards
Eskalion

2

Long post, but you type english fairly well.

Quick answer.

As an artist I find Unity pretty easy to deal with as opposed to alot of other engines, haven’t used the ones you mentioned.
I never scripted before this but it’s not too bad, alot of info out there, tuts on U-tube, etc… You can do alot with stuff included in the 2d and 3d tuts.

Unity is more 3d, but look for the 2d tut. (it’s 3d models, 2d sidescroller).

I can’t see the quicktime vids on my PC either, even after QT upate :frowning:

You seem to have a large project scope, different settings for space battles, player in ship… You can probably use different scenes for each (one could be 3d, one 2d…)

3
  1. You need to learn to program.
  2. No, Unity is 3D-only. 2D in Unity is just 3D except you ignore one of the Ds.
  3. You can program pretty much whatever you want, it’s not a matter of what Unity supports.
  4. You need Pro to play videos.
  5. See 1. It’s not hardcore C++ source code…it’s quite a bit easier than that (which is kind of the whole point), but you do need to understand programming.
  6. Can’t say, that’s up to you.
  7. There’s other video tutorials elsewhere (not sure of addresses offhand).

Your English is pretty good even if your typing isn’t perfect, actually probably better than it would be from class learning. Learning a language by just using it constantly is the way to go. Which, by the way, applies to computer languages too.

–Eric

4

I would have agreed with you maybe a year or two ago, but now that I’ve worked with unity in a 3d environment, I can see now how much work it is to make a AAA game. I still pick out glitches and notice places where a game could be better, but I’ve also learned what kinds of things in games are quick fixes and what kinds of things are big tasks that tend to only cause more problems. There’s a difference between “You know what could be so cool!?” and “We have the possessing power to do this and it would fill in the gap in gameplay here, and we can do it with only adding one texture and some code.”

and to answer some of your questions, even though they’ve already been mostly answered:

  1. 3d art is a bit different from 2d art. And unlike gamemaker, unity has no built in sprite editor. Every thing you want to make, example enemy or player or level, not only needs a texture from a 2d image, but you need a 3d model for that texture to go on. Try taking a look at the program Wings 3d modeler. It’s kind of complected at first, but it’s free and there should be some good utube video tutorials on it.
  2. There are many scripts out there you can get and mess around with for free as long as you’re not selling your game. But if you’ve worked with gamemaker, but instead of dragging and dropping icons that represent different commands, you write them down in a script.
  3. my mom forgot to buckle me into the car seat when i was a baby and i flew onto the floor when she got to a stop sign, and I’ve picked up unity fairly quickly, so i think you’ll do fine.
  4. the TornadoTwins on youtube is a good place to start
5

Hello and welcome to Unity! I think most questions have been answered already, but here’s my two cents. =)

  1. How artist-friendly is Unity compared to GameMaker/Construct/RPG Maker and other prototyping tools?
    It’s been ages since I’ve used GameMaker/ RPG Maker, but it’s both really artist- and coder-friendly.
  2. Can i make a 2d game in Unity without touching the 3d part?
    Unfortunately not. You can make it seem 2D, but it will always be a 3D game. I’m not sure on your budget, but SpriteManager might be of help here.
  3. Does it supports instance looping think: looped coridor)
    I could think of a few ways to code/ implement it, yes.
  4. Is it able to play video files from ingame as a part of the scenery? (think: AVI object displayed on ingame wall)
    This is only available in Unity Pro unfortunately.
  5. How gentle Unity is for a non-programer? (think: cutting the codding proces so the artist cannot make too many too crusial errors and find himself in deep butthhole)
    It depends. Relatively speaking, very gently. You can choose between 3 programming languages/ syntaxes, so I’m sure one of them will suit you.
  6. Assuming that when i was young i was hit in the head and also i have a brain tumor - how long it will take me to learn Unity?
    For just the program, I’d say ±2 weeks under normal circumstances. As for programming, it depends on the complexity. For the basics, I’d say ±2 weeks as well. I’m not sure how the tumor affects your ability to pick up things, so you’ll have to take that into account yourself.
  7. Is there some kind of video tutorials for Unity but NOT hosted over here in that retarded Quicktime? (which, as a side note, does not play on my PC)
    There’s some up on YouTube I think. A quick Google should do the trick.
    Optional 8.
    Is there someone, brave or stupid enough to take care of me and be my tutor in world of Unity at least until ill grasp what-go-where?
    (i am aware how naive the last request/question is. But then again, asking doesnt cost. at worst - ill just hear “No”)
    I’m quite busy these days, but if you run into any problems feel free to message me. =)

Hope this helped somewhat. Good luck!

6

I may be wrong, but look at Zombie Ville USA for the iphone. It was made with unity and is pretty 2d. So there are ways to get it to look 2d i suppose.

7

Zombieville is still 3D, which is what Senshi said. (In fact they mentioned it doesn’t even use an orthographic camera, in order to get an easy parallax scrolling effect using depth.)

–Eric

8

@Eric5h5
oh, thats how… I always thought it was all done on the GUI or something.