Unity always struck me as one of those things that’s easy to pick up, difficult to master.
Either way I find it brilliant fun to just cock about with, and it must be a lifesaver for devs who don’t have a team to back them up.
I’m not the best example because although I spent about 20 months wrestling with Unity in my 2D projects I prefer something like Monkey X, GLBasic or assembly language on a C64 over this high level visual oriented stuff. Although for 3D I do think Unity would be very cool. Having messed around with 3D in Blitz3D and Direct3D I can definitely see how much nicer of a dev environment Unity is for 3D. For 2D I find it kind of gets in the way of what I want to do as much (or more than) it helps me.
Also I think these visual tools cause people to place way too much emphasis on “looks” and a code oriented approach places more emphasis on the actual gameplay. That might just be me though and perhaps others do not get distracted and spend hours just messing around with the “look” aspects in these visual oriented dev tools. 
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My current personal project is a fixed-screen shmup. Yep, that’s right - the screen does not scroll. I’m not using any animations, but I have a sprite tool and am using all the maths 
Unity is a great tool even for retro-ish games if nothing else but for the porting ability. With Unity you can use all or none of its features, and that’s why I like it 
Project4 
Project4 
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That looks like a very interesting game and I agree it has a great retro aesthetic. I know Unity can do it… heck a friend and I were just talking about that. We used to work on some stuff together back in the Amiga days and taking a good look at Unity he is thrilled at it. I said yeah compared to what we had available to work with back in the AMOS and Blitz days on the Amiga… Unity is a great advancement. I mean you can make anything you can imagine with it even a big RPG like Skyrim as long as you limit the content maybe do some heavy reuse of assets. That is not a fault of Unity just limitations of one person wanting to finish before a decade rolls around. lol
Anyway, it can do a lot. That is for sure. And actually I must say in my latest Monkey X project I am using a tile map and was positioning some enemy spawners last night in the tile maps (using Tiled) and thinking “okay, I’ll need to write a little function to scan the map after loading, identify the spawners and add them to a list so I can process them. Be kind of cool if I could just drop those out there have them just work” which made me think “ah yeah the way I could do it in Unity”
So yeah I can see the benefits of it too. Honestly, I think it is just a quirk of myself. Like with this approach I don’t really know what Unity is actually doing behind the scenes. For some reason to me when I drag GameObjects around the scene and attach scripts to them and so forth in the back of my mind I keep thinking it is probably terribly inefficient and wasteful. Like working that way nothing is optimized and there is just a load of bloat going on hidden behind the scenes. But maybe that is not the case. I suppose it is possible they are just converting that stuff to simple optimized data structures.
Like I said. I am strange. I think the same way about Monkey X to some degree. Although it is a lower level and I am doing much more of the stuff I kind of wish I was just writing in Assembler and dealing with everything because, after all, there is a lot in Monkey X that is just provided for me to use. I don’t know exactly what is in there. Who knows what they are doing? lol
Good luck with your game. It looks interesting!
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I play a lot less games than I did back in the day, and I also tend to play less games similar to the the games I make, even though the games I make are the ones I used to enjoy the most. It is very to difficult for me to really enjoy games these days without picking them apart, seeing the glitches and over analyzing when I play, or worse, seeing something cool and pop right over to building something.
Building games all day, kinda takes the joy out of playing. But, to me, its an acceptable trade off, because I really love making games.
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Same to you!!! (and ty <3 )
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Yes I’m starting to notice this with myself as well. I don’t know if it’s good or bad honestly. I’d like to enjoy games as much as I did even 5 years ago, but I don’t think I ever will again. Maybe it’s just a part of getting older? Making games has become more enjoyable for me than actually playing them. I’m not quite sure how that happened.
I rarely touch a game, I ain’t touched a game in nearly 6 months, and even when i did, didn’t play it but maybe 5 / 10 minutes at a time. I’d just rather make games, because I don’t like the way modern games are made today. More graphics and less fun, perhaps I loved the unrealistic stuff of the old games (Turok 2) for example, the Cerebral bore (AWESOME GUN) if none of you ever played it, a freaking brain eating bomb heat seaks your skull, drills into it and explodes. But noooo, they don’t make games like that anymore, and when they do, it’s nothing impressive because then it’s just a clone of a gun they’ve seen on a classic game.
BTW - Turok 1 and 2 are getting remakes now!
EDIT -
Example of the way crap is on Modern games.
The original Turok games had like at least 15 guns minimum.
The Turok that came out on one of the Xboxs had like 4 guns. Like really dude, that ruined the entire game!
I think this is all understandable. For me games are about interaction, expression and the power to change the world (game world). Most modern games seem to fail on these aspects. Minecraft is a great example of a game that has these things in huge amounts and we also see how successful that game is. Players can create. The interaction goes way beyond that of most games. Players can literally change and create their worlds. They have a lot of freedom to express themselves. That stuff is golden.
Making games is like Minecraft taken to the next level. You have way more ability to express yourself. The degree of interaction is much higher. Making games is the ultimate game even if you never actually complete and release anything no game will offer the degree of interaction and potential for expression that making games can.
That is my 1.5 cents on it.
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I do play some games nowadays.
I work for 8 hours on my project every day (including weekends), and no more. There’s a lot of science backing that you’re most productive if you limit your work time. Before, I was working 12+ hours in a day and discovered that after a certain period of time, I started getting majorly burnt out and my progression actually slowed down significantly despite putting more time into it. Now that I strictly work for 8 hours only, I have been consistently getting things done at a decent pace without this problem.
That gives me free time for other things, which often includes some time for playing games. I think it’s rather beneficial to do so, and I don’t really have much of a social life :).
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I have a team member who doesn’t play games. He is a C++ programmer, now loves C# and while he played some games 20 years ago, he hasn’t in a while. He has made other games, mostly small ones.
We have other team members who can help explain the game stuff. Seems to work out well. Actually, kind of nice because he has a fresh outlook to a lot of stuff while the rest of us can’t help but compare to other games we have played.
I also have a younger developer who isn’t as skilled in programming but is an avid game player. They compliment each other well.
I suppose if there are designers who make the gameplay decisions and the programmers only have the job of implementing whatever they say, then games don’t need to be a requirement…
Otherwise, I think it really helps you when it comes to meeting the standards set, figuring out how to solve various problems, knowing what players like and don’t like, seeing ways that have worked, and simply having inspiration for feature ideas or even new types of games to make.
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Same here. I have like to think it is not so much good or bad, just different. There are times when I wish I could play games more (not a lack of time, more one of desire), but on the other hand, I wouldn’t change what I do for the world.
I have always been primarily a puzzle gamer, I like the challenge of solving problems. Building games has sort of been a natural progression of that interest. They are like puzzles but with multiple solutions and no instructions.
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Making your own game is like playing the ultimate sandbox really.
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with lots of “mob” to add difficulty hehehe /feature request: difficulty setting XD
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It’s often been said that the greatest game made in Unity is Unity itself.
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Sometimes I wonder if my younger programmer is actually working or playing while developing. He seems to spend a long time playing with animal AI and bows. lol
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We’re all watching. Always.
Directors watching movies.
Going back to the topic, I think OP’s assertion is true as there’s no gamer that didn’t think “man, I could totally do game like that”. Now, thanks to Unity they can try.
I expanded my assertion :c