I’ve been reading the forums and attempting to learn Unity in my spare time for a while now (about 6 months?). I have been pretty much silent on the forums until now, mostly because I don’t have much to contribute at this point. However, I do have a few questions, if anyone is able to answer
First of all, I have some ideas for a game I want to make, and ideally this game would be on the iPhone. This is the dilemma—I don’t know if I should buy the iPhone Basic license now, at the risk of never completing the game, making the investment useless, or if I should just work on the game with Unity until it is relatively complete, and then buy Unity iPhone and convert it to a Unity iPhone project.
And my second question… Assuming I choose to use Unity for now and buy Unity iPhone when I am ready… just how difficult would it be to convert a Unity project to a Unity iPhone project? Knowing that I eventually want to have it on an iPhone, are there any coding practices or other tips that I can use to simplify the process of migrating from Unity to Unity iPhone once I get to that stage?
In my view its better to develop on the platform you intend to deploy on as its all about optimization especially on the iphone and you can’t get a good and realistic vision on how things will look and feel and run without testing on the particular machine
I am in a similar situation to yours. I do not yet have Unity iPhone, but am working on a game for the platform. While SolventFactory has good advice I’m not in a position to follow it to the letter. And that should not matter if I am a careful. For example the work I am starting with is on paper: character sketches, flow charts for game logic, brainstorming ideas, roughing out algorhythms for game systems etc… From there I’ve done some modelling at very low poly for characters etc… And the last thing I’ve done is make simple test games with very simple scripts to try out the ideas in web players.
So I’ve made two sub-games that should be very easy to reuse in my future iPhone project, built up a set of assets including scripts and art, and sketched out a game plan on paper.
I’ve made good progress and had fun doing it. So I know feel ready to get the iPhone package. This has worked well for me. Now I’m trying to fix an Intel Mac I acquired for free and use that as a development machine as my computer is a PPC G5. Last week I picked up a used iPod Touch. And so I might be a week away from testing my subgames on it.
For the record I started this prework back at the end of May. So that’s my experience. I hope you find it helpful.
Actually you will get all this “how to convert and optimize” tips from the documents in the Unity iPhone package. You always can ask our support team for a trial key.
You also may find similar experience shared over iphone part of Unity forum as you are not he first one intending to port from Unity to Unity iPhone. If you’ll be aware of what you’re doing and what you can do, porting from Unity to Unity iPhone won’t be the most complex task.
Thanks for the input everyone! From the advice all of you have given I think I will go ahead and work with Unity, and then perhaps once I have something more concrete I will consider buying the iPhone license.
Speigg, if I was you I’d get Unity iPhone asap - it’s so much easier developing for iPhone using it as you can constantly test real world performance etc.
No, guys, I mean really soon. We’re testing release candidate already.
Unity iPhone 1.1 is all about speed. Most of our beta testers have experienced 30% FPS increase in their games. For some games speed improvement may reach tasty 50%.
