Hi all. I wanted to introduce myself and the team as you’ll probably see me around here quite a bit in the near future.
I’m Andy and I’m the lead developer at EiKON Games. We’re a small group of 5 people, predominantly in South-East England. We’re currently self-funded and working out of our bedrooms in the evenings and at weekends and are currently 5 years into our project.
5 years is a long time - why haven’t I posted before? We’ve spent the past 5 years using Torque (starting with TGE1.4 and going through all the iterations up to the current beta of Torque3D 1.1). A huge chunk of the time was learning the ropes and we only really started to make real progress about 18 months ago.
Unfortunately, recent goings-on over at TorquePowered forced us to seriously rethink our strategy and so I downloaded Unity. I’d downloaded it before but not really looked at it too much as we were knee-deep in Torque at that point. Truth be told, I’d always discounted Unity on the grounds that there is no source-code access.
However - 2 weeks of using it has completely dispelled any concerns I had regarding source code. Using Unity, I’ve managed to prototype stuff in a fortnight that I’d been struggling with in Torque for months! Honestly, I’ve been completely blown away by the toolset and resources available. Since I got my hands on Unity, I’ve spent time actually ‘making stuff’ instead of fighting with code and bugs (which I spent a lot of time doing with Torque)! Not that I want to bad-mouth Torque and certainly not the excellent team they had over there. However, we just felt that we needed the stability and couldn’t ‘ride it out’ to see what happens. And boy am I glad we took the decision to switch!
This is already way too long for a first post so I’ll wrap up. Mike is the guy who’s ‘baby’ this game is and I’m sure he’ll drop by to tell you all about our tactical First Person Shooter, Epoch: Incursion.
In the mean time, feel free to drop by our blog and see what we’re up to.
I’ll try and keep the beginner questions to a bare minimum!
I had been trying every engine I could find since 2004 and finally picked up Unity in early 2009. Since then I’ve occasionally been excited by word of new features in this engine or that but nothing ever comes close to the ease of using Unity.
Welcome aboard Andy! I had a similar experience as yourself with regards to Unity. I had purchased Torque several years ago and struggled with it. I ended up not getting a whole lot done, and just set it aside. Then I stumbled upon Unity last year and was blown away by it’s speed and ease of use. I almost didn’t even give it a chance at first, but I’m sure glad I did.
Anyway, I checked out your blog. Epoch: Incursion looks interesting! I look forward to seeing what you guys do with Unity!
Welcome, Andy. A 5-year indie project, wow! You have some great material linked to in your blog like this. I hope you guys remember to save it to your own site in case TorquePowered goes down.
Hey Andy - pretty excited to follow your progress. Looks like you’ve got a really professional approach to what you’re doing. Be sure to keep us posted on how things are going!
@Ostagar - good point. We’ll set about saving all our blog content down just in case the worst happens, particularly the epic motion capture blog - that was a fun day!
@andeeee - I had no idea Unity even had a UK office! Crawley’s only 20 miles from me. We may pay them a visit when we have the necessary levels of awesome to show off
Hey everyone, just wanted to echo what Andy said, many thanks for the warm welcome and I’m astounded to hear that there’s a Unity office near my home turf.
The sad happenings over at Torquepowered.com caused some deep thinking and hard choices here but I’m very very pleased to say that rapid progress is being made with Unity now and we couldn’t be happier!
