We’re going to take a look at Unity, which is an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) / game engine which lowers the game programming learning curve quite a lot, so that almost anyone can get into game programming. Watch the video to find out how.
Unity Game Engine:
Today we’re going to talk about unity, which is one of the most popular game engine available, especially in the independent developer space, also known as ‘indie’ development.
Primarily released only for OSX in 2005, since version 2.5 was ported to windows in 2009 it has been extended to target 21 platforms.
Unity is a cross platform game engine, which is primarily used to develop video games and simulations for computers, consoles and mobile devices.
It is marketed as an all purpose engine supporting both 2D and 3D graphics. The interface is easy to learn, with drag and drop content creation and the ability to script using 3 languages.
With supports low level api’s such as Metal for iOS and Vulkan for Linux and Android exporting to these platforms is a breeze.
The editor is available for Mac-os, windows and Linux (but in beta)
Platforms supported are almost all, so code once and deploy to all. Do note that once the game is exported, uploading to the appropriate mobile or console store still would require a corresponding developer license. This means that you would need a Android developer license to upload to the play store, and a Apple Developer program membership to upload to the apple app store and so on.
Unity personal edition can be downloaded free of cost, and games can be distributed and charged for as long as the unity splash screen is shown first.
If you would like to customize the splash screen, then you would need a unity plus or pro membership as per your other requirements. The plus and pro memberships are paid and plus membership goes as low as 35$ per month.
For coding Unity supports C#, boo which is similar to python and UnrealScript which is similar to ECMAScript/ javascript. You can also extend unity via c++ when native performance is required.
Unity integrates well with Mono Develop and even Visual Studio with full debugging and will also work well with existing versioning systems, so it would be easy for a company to integrate unity into their development environment.
Unity has a robust 2d and 3D engine, basically unity was built for 3D, but the tools have been extended to support 2D. With inbuilt tools for editing audio, physics engine, particle systems, animation support, IK, etc etc we can confidently say, unity has everything we need to build a game and export the same built in.
We can import models in from almost any 3d application like blender, maya, 3ds max etc
Unity is quite extensible, and has an asset store available where we can purchase any kind of asset such as models , animation, scripts and also complete game code.
Tons of tutorials are available online if you want to delve into Unity
There are other engines like the CryEngine and Unreal Engine which have a more robust engine as compared to Unity, but unity is easier to learn and has huge community backing, and getting developers for unity is easy.
Vinayak Nair is a self-confessed geek from the days when computer memory was measured in Kilobytes. I create YouTube videos on 3D Printing, DIY Projects, Everyday tech reviews and also delve into gaming.