I was wondering whether a good game could be made using ONLY Unity. No third party tools, no external graphics editors, no modeling software, no sound editor or music composer, no texture libraries, no asset-store add-ons or packages, just plain vanilla Unity Editor by itself plus scripting. I ask partly to assess whether/what kind of games could be possible just within Unity, and secondly to question/discuss whether Unity should be more of a standalone development system or rely so heavily on external tools.
I guess with scripting you could do a lot of procedural content generation. Otherwise you’re stuck with the basic sphere/cube etc shapes, no texturing. I guess you could still use lighting, animation editor window, physics, etc… a fairly simple graphics style unless you generate texture data. Then there’s putting together game levels … is it really as easy and full featured as it should be?
Well you say no asset store addons but surely they are just scripting if you had the same skill levels, so in theory there is no limit to what can be created with the off the shelf Unity if you have the time and ability.
I think its inappropriate to disallow asset store addons as those ARE within unity. They were done complying to your requirements
No it shouldn’t. trying to do it all will never work out fine. You can’t have a staff of 500+ engineers just to cover all those parts and remain in the greens, cause other teams are already there and have the tech while UT would first need to start at 0. In case of audio and modelling thats over a decade of experience missing.
You know what i was thinking about before i opened up this thread?
Why are there so many angry users on this forum (AngryBear+^,AngryCSharpNerd, AngryOrange, AngryAnt, …)?
Anyway, you can make a lot, as you said utalise the few built in features and calculate the rest (models, textures, sound) but it would take, according to what you’re trying to achieve, a lot longer. Beside of this Unity and dynamic aren’t always the best friends.
Along those lines, you could simply buy the graphics and models you need and use Unity’s built in GUI. And now, with even more features coming (like animation) possibilities are really opening up.
Yes, as you answered yourself. Either as a very stylised game or one that could look as good as anything else using procedural methodology.
In fact I think this would be a wonderful idea for a competition, design something using just Unity, no third party assets, just the stuff that comes with Unity, including the external packages (though that does give you quite a few textures, which may influence the results). Would make for quite a different challenge to normal competitions.
This is your really question and you’re whole post is deliberately worded to try to elicit the answer you appear to want which is that Unity suddenly needs to include 3d modelling, photoshop, audio and all manor of other pointless editors. It would be a complete waste of time and resources for Unity to invest in adding editors for stuff like that since their exists both professional and free alternatives.
In fact there is nothing to stop you from writing these editors yourself using the features that Unity already provides, 3d modelling can be done, image editing can be done, even audio editing, synthesisers, sequencers etc.
If anything i’d rather Unity spent a bit more time not focused on adding ‘cool’ new features that could be done by third party’s and ensure that what we do have is fully featured, polished and open via the API. That is improve the core aspects of Unity.
Unity seeks to be a flexible middleware package to make game development and prototyping easier and faster. I don’t really see that being along the lines of a “one tool does all”. If this were the case, it would become bloated and restrictive… as one set of tools is one person’s delight and another’s torment.
You should allow asset store addons though… with Ragespline or even better Ragepixel, many really cool things can be done right in the editor itself. (Keely, much love :P)
Nope, no asset store allowed, nothing third party, nothing anyone else made even if it’s free. Not even the free packages that Unity provides. You’re on your own, Unity editor is in front of you, you have no other resources. What do you make?
Technically you could do pretty much anything; you could replicate a high poly bump mapped model by plugging in every vertex and pixel by hand in a script if you were OCD enough. It’s all a matter of how much time you’re willing to waste doing something that could more easily be done using another app or someone else’s help.
Or instead of that you could develop modeling and texturing tools in Unity as people on the Asset Store have done. You have even more options if you have Unity Pro and its render to texture support.
So should Unity be a one-stop editor for game creation, or will it always be dependent on significant external packages and third-party extensions? Do you think that the Unity asset store is evidence of UT’s unspoken intention NOT to be a be-all-end-all-do-everything package?
Unity is a game engine and that’s something that seems to be overlooked a bit in this thread. It’s not a content creation tool, but a method for organising existing content into new content. It shouldn’t be a one-stop-shop for everything you need since, as the old saying goes “Jack of all trades, but master of none.”
No, the tool that does it ALL does nothing right .
While where at it I guess Unity needs to come with a music syth so I can create even my music inside of the game .
Don’t know what the point of asking this is , Blender is free , Gimp is free, its far easier to use these free tools then trying to force yourself to use Unity to do everything.
No, no, a thousand times no. Apps should have a focus, and they should work to be good at what they do. I already have Photoshop, I don’t want the Unity team wasting millions of dollars and years of work to make a Photoshop clone. Unity is a game engine, and it should focus on being a good game engine. Mega-ultimate-everything-apps try to do too many things at once and fail miserably at all of them.
Why are we allowed an OS, if Unity is one stop I don’t want to have to buy an OS. Hell I don’t even want to buy a computer, it should be part of Unity. And a connection to the electricity grid… why doesn’t unity come with its own power generator and enough fuel to keep it running!