Yeah, the more I use it the more I like Unity as well. And that’s pretty impressive, considering that I work with it professionally and I also use it as a hobbyist out of hours. It ain’t perfect, but nothing is, and it makes the vast majority of what I want to do relatively easy.
Having said that, I really should do a project or two in some other engine at some point. My experience used to span quite a few different engines/toolsets, but for the past couple of years it has just been Unity, and I’m a firm believer that if you want to keep your skills up to their full potential you need a bit of variety to expand your point of view.
Have to agree with this. Whether you’re talking engines or scripting language, it’s kind of sad/funny how overspecialization can mean you’re not reaching your full potential. Even if it’s a case of just “dorking” around with something else, you may see something that you would not have thought of while working with your main toolset.
It might result in your jumping ship for a period of time, bringing what you know into another environment - and thus - the combination increases your overall skills. Perhaps you find something from somewhere else that you can implement into what you’re already doing, so you bring that back, but once again you’ve increased your overall skills and knowledge.
People do not have to be fanbois, to get stuck in that sort of technological rut and find themselves left behind… it happens to regular folks as well.
As the people evolve, the products evolve, and the people evolve.
Personally, I think I’ve actually gotten lazy…having reached a certain comfort level…and thus my skills, abilities, knowledge, talents, etc - have dulled. Sometimes we need to step out of that comfort zone, in order to thrive…
Agree Unity community is great, forums are really alive and always full of information. Power of this forums doubles the strenght of Unity engine. Asset store triples it.
Spontaneuos praise thread! Allow me to join in as well.
Unity to me is the best game engine out there, by far. I moved to it from Flash, and if you ever had the misfortune of having to work with that, I don’t need to tell you what an improvement in quality of life working with Unity is. (Granted, coding with a magnetized needle over an open hard drive is more pleasurable than working in Flash, but that’s besides the point)
Unity’s got it all. Just that. Once you learn the workflow and get into the mindset, you wonder how it was that you got anything done on other platforms. Everything you need is there in one way or another, and whatever isn’t there can be added in. As someone said earlier, it never gets to the point of frustration, even when things don’t work out as you expect.
Hats off to the dev team, this is a brilliant piece of software you’ve created!
When I first downloaded Unity, I snubbed it because it had no pre-made game in it like UDK had, nor did it have code I could subclass to make my game work. (I didn’t know about Bootcamp). Then I came back to it wanting to make a simple game for a friend, and started to realize the power it had in its simplicity. Everything from the interface to the scripting was easy to use. From then on, I stopped using UDK.
I try to go back to UDK and realize that it’s scripting is a horror show.
For me its the Asset store, I don’t want to have to build a decent GUI system from scratch , so 95$ latter I have NGUI( tell me the built in GUI sucks and i’ll tell you about all the game devs who need to use Scaleform ontop of UDK or whatever game engine to draw their own GUI’s ) .
The vast majority of things work , and support is very helpfull for the occasional dud .
Very well put. Whenever I get comfortable with certain area or toolset, I seek out areas that I am uncomfortable with to expand my skills. Having cross-discipline skills is a very useful/valuable trait to have. Often challenges can arise due to art/design/frontend/backend/services not understanding enough of another area to enable things work well together. Being able to bridge these areas can give you insights others might not be able to see.
Additionally, as you were saying about overspecialization and ruts, not only does that lead to getting left behind, but in large teams/studios, that can prevent inovation. Certainly it isn’t a great idea to chase down every new shiny thing that comes along, but also not exploring new things at all is not healthy.
I came to Unity from Torque 3D back in May 2012. I’m not trying to slam Torque because I will still eventually finish the projects I started with it but I have to say I was able to do more with Unity in 2 days than I was able to with Torque in 9 months. Unity is a great environment and the support is awesome. The asset store has more variety as well. Unity, in my opinion, has great documentation and is a real engine. You don’t have rely on the community to fix bugs or add functionality. It is much more than a FPS that you can modify. It is a complete development environment where you can make your game come alive.
Sorta sad but I came to Unity from a little program called Game Maker, in which I was creating some 2D games, I tried a few times to move over from that program to unity and learn JavaScript/C# in a very detailed manor, the first two times I was too lazy to attempt it. Then finally i lost my “Its too hardddd” attitude and man’d up an now Ihave never looked back.
So after a few tutorial videos on how to actually understand the unity inspector, hierarchy and project it was great .
So I agree with OP Unity is amazing! And I’m glad I man’d up those 5 months ago.
While I do agree, I will always have love and special place in my heart for Torque. Partially because I used to work at GG, but also because they sort of started this whole thing. An accessible multi-platform, robust game dev tool that works well for independent games as well as larger ones. In many ways I think Unity is continuation of what Torque started.
And there is the big problem right there. Flash is not and never was a “game engine”. Though that is what it is most often used for, had MM/Adobe actually recognized this several years back and made it more targeted for creating games, people wouldn’t be switching to tools like Unity.
They have said recently that they are focusing on game creation now, but it may be a little late.
I feel the same was as that guy. I can’t imagine what it was like in 2007… I just had my openurl moment a couple weeks ago. There’s so much potential beyond just games. From setting up a php highscores I learned enough about php to make a web scraper, authenticate new users by email, and now I’m looking at building a some seo tools with unity. www.LoadImageIntoTexture(); is so cool too.
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