Unity: A noob's cranium explodes...
I have had the most amazing weekend (no, I did not bungee jump storms river)... sorry for the long post.
It was my first foray into all things Unity as a totally new user and I'd just like to share the experience...
The random course I happened to embark on as a first time user might benefit other developers considering making the leap (I come from C#, MonoGame background):
1) Completed the space shooter tutorial... a 2D game using 3D mesh thingies. (Teaches one a lot about the GUI, camera, transforms as well as GameObjects, prefabs, rigidbody physics, colliders etc)
2) Learnt a lot about menus, touch buttons and scene transitions. (An alternate approach here, which works well - did not look at OnGUI approach yet)
3) Managed to deploy a simple app example to a) web app, b) windows desktop app, c) windows 8 store app - PC AND tablet and on d) an Android phone. That's five different platforms/devices! What!? And it cost 0 cents for licences... :) If I had WP8, iOS or BlackBerry devices that would be 8.
4) Added an MP3 soundtrack with ease to a game scene - no content pipeline required, drag-and-drop mostly...
5) Got multiple 2D spritesheet animations (idle, walk, run, jump) working and synced to a physics object with their various states thanks to this tutorial.
I love Monogame, but the small amount of effort required to achieve these things in Unity just boggles the mind as it seems so much quicker and easier?
It's still early days, but things are really looking good from a productivity perspective.
Now how do i plug ads into this thing? Flappy clone, here I come! (I can hear the collective facepalm happening)
Actually I'd like to explore creating a procedural generated level (2-Dim array) next and/or creating a static one in Tiled
and importing it as JSON into a game scene. I have a game prototype in mind and I'm feeling inspired by this fantastic free futuristic (fff?) technology!
In retrospect those poor developers in the 90's had to code all these things by hand (blood, sweat and tears). We live in an interesting era... everything (technology) seems to accelerate exponentially as time passes... where is it all going to end up, geeez? (Whisper "pacman" into a mic and unity complies...?)
Exciting times! :)
</UnityAdoration>
It was my first foray into all things Unity as a totally new user and I'd just like to share the experience...
The random course I happened to embark on as a first time user might benefit other developers considering making the leap (I come from C#, MonoGame background):
1) Completed the space shooter tutorial... a 2D game using 3D mesh thingies. (Teaches one a lot about the GUI, camera, transforms as well as GameObjects, prefabs, rigidbody physics, colliders etc)
2) Learnt a lot about menus, touch buttons and scene transitions. (An alternate approach here, which works well - did not look at OnGUI approach yet)
3) Managed to deploy a simple app example to a) web app, b) windows desktop app, c) windows 8 store app - PC AND tablet and on d) an Android phone. That's five different platforms/devices! What!? And it cost 0 cents for licences... :) If I had WP8, iOS or BlackBerry devices that would be 8.
4) Added an MP3 soundtrack with ease to a game scene - no content pipeline required, drag-and-drop mostly...
5) Got multiple 2D spritesheet animations (idle, walk, run, jump) working and synced to a physics object with their various states thanks to this tutorial.
I love Monogame, but the small amount of effort required to achieve these things in Unity just boggles the mind as it seems so much quicker and easier?
It's still early days, but things are really looking good from a productivity perspective.
Now how do i plug ads into this thing? Flappy clone, here I come! (I can hear the collective facepalm happening)
Actually I'd like to explore creating a procedural generated level (2-Dim array) next and/or creating a static one in Tiled
and importing it as JSON into a game scene. I have a game prototype in mind and I'm feeling inspired by this fantastic free futuristic (fff?) technology!
In retrospect those poor developers in the 90's had to code all these things by hand (blood, sweat and tears). We live in an interesting era... everything (technology) seems to accelerate exponentially as time passes... where is it all going to end up, geeez? (Whisper "pacman" into a mic and unity complies...?)
Exciting times! :)
</UnityAdoration>
Comments
Look forward to seeing some games!