I am curious how many developer’s started their game development careers with Unity. Unity appears to be an advanced tool that abstracts away many of the brick and mortar tasks associated with game development. I chose this path for that very reason, Unity appears to be method of getting maximum results with relatively little effort (please note: I am stating this by comparing Unity to purely programmatic solutions such as C# and XNA or C++ and Orge 3D.) Unity provides a large base of boiler plate code for completing common tasks and also provides configuration options associated with that code. My question is am I missing out on a vital learning opportunity by using Unity? More directly am I pigeon holding myself by not learning how to build from the ground up?
Unless your goal is to become familiar with developing a game engine there isn’t much of an advantage now to learning the lower level APIs. Learning C++ might be a different story because some game engines (eg UE4) use it for scripting.
I started in 2014 and at that point, it came up as the clear favourite for me, especially as I was interested in mobile at the start. I’d say there’s no better engine to start with either, tutorials in the learn section are perfect, and there’s nothing like building a top down space shooter in a few hours and putting it on your phone.
Thanks for the replies guys. The community here is really helpful and Unity provides nice learning tools. I am looking forward to becoming proficient with Unity and eventually bringing some of ideas to life.
I started with mix of goldSrc and IdTech3, but moved to unity mostly due to being able to prototype faster and its ability to easily port to other platforms + mobile.
I mucked about with DirectX over the years, but never got really into due to the sheer nature of work required just to get a cube spinning on the screen.
I then got a bit into XNA, which seemed way more efficient for building games, but never really did anything useful with it.
I took an introduction to game programming class that focused on XNA. I really enjoyed it, but apparently XNA is no longer being actively maintained. Glad to hear that Unity was the right tool for you.
I don’t think XNA had any sort of future with the emergence of Unity, so not surprising it no longer became maintained.
It kind of became the ‘odd man out’, being in between something like Unity, and writing DirectX code.
Very often people who start by making a C++ engine never complete a game. Been there done that. XD You must be clear about your goals. Do you want to make a game or an engine? Generally it’s silly to start with making an engine because without direct experience completing games you will not be able to design your engine properly.
I come from Flash mostly started with AS1 then AS2 and AS3, been doing it for a long time because Flash was fun and interactive, and you could make game with it
Then Flash start dying. You often see Flash vs HTML5 which make sense on user side, HTML5 was replacing Flash. But for any dev that was ask to now do HTML5 stuff it felt like a 10 years backward. Unity appear on windows and start growing and it became an easy transition for those who wanted some of the feeling thats flash provided with a well featured language (C# instead of AS3). So that’s what i did.
Like others say, you don’t miss anything unless your goal is to work on engine itself, like being employed by Unity. If your goal is to make game you will have still a lot to learn and some specialize in particular area such as UI, AI, tool maker, shaders…
I started with XNA and DirectX and then moved to Unity. Unity helped me a lot to focus on improving my weak area that is art and design.
I think there is no need to re-invent the wheel but I will keep learning C++ and DirectX on side since it allows me to understand that how Unity accomplishes many things behind the scene besides helping in debugging efforts etc.
