Okay, I’ve finally decided on a game I’d like to make for the i-phone. The only problem is that after a little research into Unity, I’ve discovered that it doesn’t do 2D at all. Is this true? I plan to make a game which is primarily 2D and I just want to make sure I’m not adding a bunch of extra steps in trying to make 3D stuff look two dimensional.
I know that Torque for the iphone can do 2D games, but I’m really trying to lean towards Unity. (because I’ve had some bad experiences with Torque wayback when)
How easy is it to make 2D iphone games using Unity? I don’t have much programming experience… I wouldn’t consider myself a beginner but I’m not quite at the intermediate stage either.
I’ve noticed that Torque features a WYSIWYG level editor… is there anything similar on Unity as far as a 2D setup is concerned?
Also if anyone has any experience with both and can share their views I’d love to hear them. My concern with Torque is that I bought the original Torque engine years ago and it required far more scripting than I was comfortable with. Though looking at the new editors makes me think I could manage with it now.
One last thing… is the iphone Unity thing a seperate app, is it an addon to Unity? Is it just a license? What exactly am I getting when I pay for Unity iphone?
I prototyped Debris (a 2D game) with Unity, ShiVa, and Torque Game Builder before going with Unity which I think is the best game development technology currently available. By jumping to Unity from TGB I had to scrap my sprite based graphics for a mixture of 3D and 2D stuff but it was a trivial jump.
Unity can do 2D easily while Torque for iPhone does not do 3D at all without the purchase of another license which isn’t available yet. Unity’s level editor is also better than Torque’s whether you’re going 2D or not. Get Unity and don’t look back.
Again, the 2D workflow isn’t as optimal as 3D but it’s definitely doable.
No, not for anything 2D related (there isn’t a 2D GUI or “sprite” editor. For 3D assets (even flat planes used in a largely 2D rendered game) you can definitely use visual tools to move, rotate and scale objects.
You have to buy a Unity license, then purchase a Unity iPhone add-on license. You will in fact install two apps in parallel (Unity for desktop/web, Unity iPhone for iPhone/iPod touch), but they share one license/activation. Again, iPhone publishing is provided as an add-on to an existing Unity license.
I’ll let others with direct Torque and iPhone experience chime in as there are plenty lurkin’ about!
You can do 2D just fine with Unity. Just depends on how you want to make your 2D game. If you are looking to use a bunch of sprites, than no, unity is not for you. But if you want to use 3d meshes and make a 2D game by locking them on the same Z position, that is fine.
Unity iPhone is a separate application from the regular unity, but looks same.
I suggest you download the demo and give the 2D tutorial a try. Unity does use a visual 3d editor for managing your scene, and you can play run the game in the editor. There are screenshots on the site.
Thanks for the fast responses! So I’m assuming that the “2D” used in tumbledrop is just flat polys with textures mapped on them, constrained to two planes?
If so, how many of these polys could be on an iphone screen without it getting bogged down? Would 50 textured polys slow things down? 100? 200? I’m guessing texture size also matters… what is the typical resolution for images to look decent for iphone?
I’m assuming it’s simple enough to constrain things to only… say… the x and y axis.
I believe so, the author is lurking about here on the forums so find him and ask! (search the Showcase section)
The general rule of thumb is to only have 7000-10000 polygons visible at any one time, but that must be balanced against everything else you have going on so it requires testing. For example, I wouldn’t imaging it very wise to have 3500 separate two-poly planes dashing about.
Remember that the screen is only 480x320 so it’s not large at all, small textures can be used in many areas and look fantastic.
Yup.
The proof is always in the pudding. If you have the iPhone SDK installed (the paid version) then ping me and I’ll set you up with a trial build right away. Throw Unity against the rocks for 30-days and decide for yourself.
Just don’t do one elemental failure when comparing:
iTGB is NOT TGB, at least if you wanted to use it on the iPhone and not only on Windows.
There are various problems, including problems with the resource handling that will make it near impossible to create a fully fledged game.
For example, compressed sound support does not exist and 3mins of wav is not really possible with the RAM restrictions you have on the iphone.
Also dynamic load and unload is bugged, making access violation errors good comrades of you if you like it or not.
Too make that topic worse, the staff handling iTorque is definitely to small given the task they approached there (getting the torque mess to the slow iphone) currently so progress is slow and right now near frozen as they want to get iTGE out as well.
There have been two releases of iTGB (1.0.1 and 1.1) in the 6 months of its existance and major bugs and flaws still have not been adressed so currently you will have to dive into its engine source to fix some of the things yourself so they work in your scenario.
I’ve actually dropped over 100 hours of work invested in iTGB and am working on the project I wanted to do there doing it on Unity iPhone. Forces / Offers me to rework the 2D content and use 3D instead which takes a fair amount of time but in the end I know that there is a much more realistic chance that my game will ever be released without forcing me to rewrite large parts of the technology I use (if I wanted to do that, I would use SiO2 or OOlongengine)
iTGB has a last chance to proof that it is able to fullfill its advertisements 1.0 advertisement from Sept 08 with its next release.
If that will fail again, I’ll get a refund and leave it behind me, as I am not willing to use iTGB, fix all the stuff myself and still beeing forced to show their logo and that after I payed twice the TGB Pro price for this broken, non optimized iPhone TGB addon.
Oh and yeah working with the source is not optional. You won’t get more than a basic puzzle game to run fluently when using scripting
Wow I had no idea the iPhone torque was THAT bad. It sounds like it’s so bad you couldn’t really ship a full product because it’s missing so much core functionality.
Just to chime in with the chorus
I bought iTGB early, then took one look at their 1.0 release and switched to Unity iPhone literally the next day. I fled in horror I guess you could say. And I had been knocking around with TGE and TGB for a while.
I am really pleased with Unity. My dominos game for iphone is 2d but is definitely benefiting from 3d models and camera action.
I wonder what the response would be to a similar post over in the iTGB forum? Oh, I forgot. The iTGB forum is private so you would need to buy it first to get access. Must be some reason they keep it private…
hmmmm
would be massive … 30 licensees or alike create a lot of postings … ah no wait, only 10 posters commonly with 3 beeing devs.
And I’m one of those 10, who is actually currently ensuring that the state of itgb is not forgotten over the interest to push iTGE out.
After all, having a technology that you can fairly call iCrash (my favorite nick for iTGB) is kind of very problematic. Especially when the editor does not work correctly on OSX (remember, the iphone main platform) and the pvr format follows the official specs, not iphone specs so users of the iphone sdk don’t get alpha textures in and until recently didn’t get any pvr in at all.
That together with the fact that the osx build has issues the windows build hasn’t and the fact that it has no compressed sound support ensure that I definitely won’t shut till they stop to drive 2 iphone technologies with 2.5 developers (that number is an assumption basing on the amount of devs and dev related people posting there)
I’ve posted elsewhere on the subject, but I’ll re-iterate that a 2d style in Unity is quite easy, it just requires that your 2d elements be textured onto planes. All it takes is some kind of 3d app to generate your necessary geometry and basic knowledge of UV texturing.
This might sound counter intuitive, but there are a lot of benefits to having your workspace actually be a 3d environment. For one, you get all of the animation power that your 3d app offers. If you’re used to working in 3d at all, it helps a lot to have control over the scale and rotation of things in a familiar way. Also, being able to non-destructively try different resolutions for your sprites is a godsend - unity automatically will take your artwork in .PSD format and convert and shrink it down to any requested texture size without messing with the original file. So you can quickly test to see how low-res is TOO low-res without constantly going back to your image editing program and re-saving.
I think the trailer for Zombieville gives a good idea of how rich unity’s 2d can be.
Sounds good… now I just need to buy a mac… and an iphone… and unity… and unity for iphone… and I’ll be all set.
It really is a bummer that you have to have a Mac just to build games for the iphone. It’s gonna cost me upwards of $3,000 just to make an iphone game. :?
I’m still going to wait for 2.5 simply because I can at least use Unity on my PC as well. (plus I don’t exactly have the cash to buy a Mac right now)
Mac Mini + Unity Indie + Unity Basic + $99 Apple iPhone dev fee = $1299, not $3000. (Keeping in mind that the current Mini won’t generate occlusion culling due to the GMA950, but while that’s a “nice to have” thing, it’s not necessary for most games.)
Quick question about licensing… Do you have to buy the pro versions of Unity if you haven’t made over $100,000 in the last year as a game studio, or do you have to buy it if your game sells more than $100,000?
By the way, thanks everyone for the answers and assistance. The community is definitely helpful and supportive so that’s a big plus.
I dont know anything about torque and as an artist not a great deal about coding, however we’ve produced one 2d/3d iPhone game and are in the process of another, the gameplay for bother is 2d.
From an artists point of view Unity is great, but for me it was this very active community that helped us make the move to Unity, as having a good group of people to help get you through the inevitable problems is invaluable, not only that but the dev team are very active in this forum and I’m sure that’s also helped develop Unity as it is now.
