I’m starting an internship at a video game company in a week or so and I’d like to polish up on my programming / design skills. For the next week I’m going to try and make a Megaman engine. Megaman is my favorite video game series and it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time so I figured now would be a great time! I’ve worked with GameMaker so I’m pretty familiar with it, but I haven’t worked with Unity all that much. I only really know the basics and have yet to implement anything of my own. The company that I will be working for uses Unity as their primary platform for development.
What do you all think? Do you think Unity would be better suited to a Megaman clone or would GameMaker be more friendly to this kind of thing? It would be nice to learn Unity before my job began, but I’m more looking to just get my brain going more than get a better feel for Unity. I’ll be trained for the first few weeks that I’m there. This is really just a personal assignment for my own fun.
It would probably make sense to use Unity to give you a headstart with your internship. Your supervisor/instructor will appreciate the fact that he/she won’t have to start from scratch, showing you the very basics of Unity. They already let you know in advance which engine they are using, so you might want to take the hint and make yourself familiar with it now. After all, you probably want to make a good impression during your internship, as a positive recommendation from that internship might be your first step towards working in the industry.
That aside, I can’t see any reason for not using Unity for Megaman game. It surely would be suitable for that. I can’t tell you whether Unity or GameMaker would be more fun for this project - that’s a matter of personal taste.
Imo, you would be better off making a 2d game with a more 2d specific engine. Unity can do 2d just fine, but it pretty much requires external assets with features for tilemapping and sprite sheets to name a few. For an asset with those features, I recommend you check out this link. http://code.google.com/p/simplesprite/
Unity, get up to speed with the tech you need in your placement, if your already up and running then you can get more out of your training. Also Megaman does not have to be 2D you can use the 3D platformer example as a starting point and build up from there. Althought again this depends on what your internship company makes if they use Unity for 2D go 2D if 3D go 3D.
Then you will get the benefit of learning at your own pace and making something you really like, giving you a leg up for your internship. WIN WIN!
Starting an internship in a week with a game-engine you’ve never used?
Make pong in U3D right now. If you do it in a couple hours then you can consider something more complicated, if you can’t then it’s a good wake up call.
Thanks for the replies everyone. They accepted me with the knowledge that I haven’t worked with Unity before. I have been running through some tutorials and examples for the past week or so and will continue to do so until the internship begins. Like I said, this Megaman project would just be something for my personal enjoyment. It would be very helpful to my knowledge in Unity for my internship. I’ll be using Unity for this project, I’ve been convinced.
I know I could find this information online somewhere, but I’ll just ask a couple of questions since you were all so helpful and quick to respond!
How would you recommend I do animation? Individual images or a sprite sheet? If I could use a sprite sheet (which would be preferable), does Unity use sprite sheets innately or would I need to download an extension? I’m sure I could figure out the rest of the game, animation was annoying for me when using GameMaker so I’m concerned about it with Unity.
Also, has anyone heard of Megaman X Corrupted? It’s a fan made Megaman X game that’s still in production. If not, check it out videos of it on youtube or elsewhere, it looks incredible! At some point, I’d love to get together an online team and work on a project. Who knows, if this works out well enough, maybe I’ll be back to ask around.
The built-in Unity3D functions are not good for creating 2D games, you should probably use a 3rd party library instead. There are several products in the Unity Asset Store that could be useful for creating such kind of games, some of them are paid and some of them are free, you should study those products and see which one would be better for your game.
As a bonus point, if you find out which 2D framework is used in the game company, you could try to use the same framework in your fangame
I see people reccomending he use a premade asset in the asset store but if you guys read the first post he seems to want to do it himself. In game maker he wouldn’t have access to a premade asset so why should he in unity? Yes unity was made for 3D development but there is nothing wrong with using it for 2D development. Those sprite kits were made by someone from scratch, if they can do it so could he. Yes using a sprite kit asset fromthe store would cut his development time, however he said this is a personal project. So why not take his time and create everything from scratch. Yes it will be hard. Yes it will be challanging. But it will be worth it in my opinion. There is my 2 cents…
I reccomend you use unity. Do research, take your time and enjoy your work.
