Learning Unity 00: Introduction

What is Unity?

Unity is a game engine and development platform. It comes bundled with Mono Develop as a programming IDE. It has a pretty small learning curve to the point where even those with little to no programming experience can build something with it.

Why learn it?

Well I've had the desire to create a game for 10 or more years now. It all started with Ultima Online and a RunUO powered shard. It was my first taste of crafting a world with programming and I never forgot it. RunUO is a reverse engineered server implementation for Ultima Online which is written in C# and is very easy to modify and extend . Topping that off I have a background in art and I like to write/read fantasy/sci-fi. But most importantly; I'm a programmer with 6 years of training (two diplomas, one in Computer Engineering & Software Development and the other for Computer Analyst) and 4 years of professional experience.

Why Unity?

Mainly because it's free and all the hard work is done for you leaving the fun stuff for me to do. And since the engine it self is maintained by a third party I don't have to support it. I've also looked into other possibilities:

• OGRE: I used it for a week until I decided it wasn't worth the effort. OGRE is a pretty good rendering engine but you have to create the rest of the game engine yourself and frankly I don't have that much free time.
• Unreal Engine: Was my second look and I was intrigued but then this project faded from view for a while and I never really gave it too much of a try.
• Unity: Where I work, Queen's University, they offer a Game Design course in Computer Science. We had a student do placement in my office and he told me about Unity and I was intrigued. I got back into the game design mood and did a lot of research on Unity and there is a lot of documentation to be found and its very easy to get into. My real enjoyment of it came from its scripting which is done in C#, javascript or boo (of course being a java developer and having a lot of experience with C# I chose C#). The scripting in Unity is great, there are absolutely no limits in what you can do and a lot can be done in a very short amount of time.
• Unreal Engine: This time I took a more serious look at the Unreal Development Kit (UDK) and based on videos and content coming from Epic it's the next Holy Grail. To be honest; the Videos Epic put out showing off its features are mouth watering. However my first twinge of doubt was when they showed off their Kismet Visual Scripting System. Don't get me wrong its pretty damn neat, however, I keep thinking why? When you're writing code you visualize this data in a similar way in your head and can write it 10 times faster then point and clicking in a GUI then connecting inputs and output with a bezier. In the end I came to the conclusion that UDK may be able to generate a prettier game but Unity is just going to be more fun developing in and I feel a lot more flexible with what I can create.
• Cryengine: All I can say is, “Beautiful”. This engine is absolutely stunning. However it's meant for a 1st/3rd person game and in my initial dive into the game development world I am intending to make a RTS/TBS game. From the examples and videos of RTS games created using Cryengine it just seems to be lacking. Sure the visuals still look nice but it's still, in essence, a first or third person game looking straight down.

Other Plans

I had played around with the idea of doing a video series on Youtube of the development process however I'm not sure who would bother watching it and as such wouldn't be worth the effort. However, if people do end up following this blog and they seem interested I may change my mind.

What's Next?

My first goal is to come up with basic unit selection, management and movement. My next post will detail my design and go over my implementation and my reasons why I did what I did.