The aesthetics are very important and enforce our theme. We want the game to look gorgeous, with nice soft lighting and effects. I’m especially a fan of bloom/glow, which I noticed is only available in the Pro license =(
We don’t have the funds to get a Pro license, but we’re worried that we need the features of Pro to get the look we want. I took a look at the platforming tutorials with Lerpz, and while they did look great, I was a little underwhelmed by the lighting.
So, please let me know your thoughts. And, I’m not sure if this is blasphemy or not, but if Unity is not the right engine for this project, are there any other free (or very cheap) alternatives? We’re looking into Unreal, which has a gorgeous lighting engine, but it seems a little overkill for our project.
Well Feist was made with Unity, although I’m pretty positive it was done with Pro. As for the look you are going for, it may be hard to do with Unity free to be honest. Post processing is pro only, so you would be stuck trying to fake the look by some other means.
If you are good with Lightmaping and scene lighting and have a decent programer/s on your team i’m pretty confident you could achieve the desired effects.
I mean there have been many gorgeous art driven games on engines that are by far inferior to unity.
unity free is very flexible and most of your limitations end with your imagination. from personal experience the unreal engine is by far that much more complicated and offers a healthy challenge(If you go for unreal and use the bsg tools you’ll learn about the challenge of bsg holes)
ultimately i recomend trying some prototyping in unity it is a very fast process and a decent programer will be able to write and integrate several scripts in a day with ease. Combined with a team of artists you could build a game very quickly. I once heard of a game that was made by 2 guys based on ideas from a forum thread, in a single 24hr session and released for the iphone the very next day. I think that really stands to the character of the Unity engine
I appreciate your help! I definitely know what you’re talking about with the ease of use, I LOVE how fast you can get a nice prototype or even finished product going in Unity.
The thing is we’re not really strapped for time, we’re going to have a good amount of time set aside for polish, and want to use that time to make the game look as best as we can since the “competition” looks fantastic!
Unfortunately, THIS is the area where we don’t want to spend too much time… the polish phase, we really want to just have the tools available to us and go to town.
I don’t think you need Unity Pro to make an art game. The only thing that would really be neccisary that is featured in all of those games would be post effects, and those are really just icing. For example, braid is just sprites and particle effects, which is possible using Unity Free.
Besides post effects, none of the Unity pro graphical features would be suited towards art games. So I guess you have to weight the importance of post effects. Using Braid as an example again, the rewind effect used a post effect to tint the screen. But if you are slightly clever (plane with an additive or multiply particle shader in front of the camera), you can achieve a very similar effect. I think all of those games also have some sort of glow effect, but it is very hard to notice and might not be worth 1,500$ for each install for your development company.
Indie is enough for what you want to do. Just think SNES days where 3D wasn’t common and rather expensive for the hardware to do. All those games just used cleaver mixing of sprites and particles. You will just have to use a little extra creativity if you wish to have an effect similar to what you would have in pro for your game. If you have a very hand drawn art style such as braid, having 100% accurate lighting all the time will be overlooked by most players in my opinion. Now, if you wanted to make a contestant to Crysis, then you would need pro to compete with creating all those shadows and HDR bloom.