Unity3D So Far

We're about a week and a half away from our scheduled finish date for the Digital Archaeology Project. It's a little unnerving, but I'm not too worried.

The technical team decided to work with the Unity Game Development Tool, and so far it's pretty cool, albeit a bit overwhelming. It reminds me of Adobe Photoshop, but my past experience with entity systems and components has definitely helped.

I'm especially thankful for a nice, well thought out API site that Unity has implemented. It comes with code examples for all 3 of the supported scripting languages ("JavaScript", C#, and Boo).

Unity has many features, and a ton of preloaded components to add to your game objects. It's shockingly simple to create a physics-enabled environment. The power of Unity comes in the in the ability to run the game and modify values real-time. It makes tweaking things like the UI a cinch, allowing the developer to get back to doing things that are more deserving of their attention.

I'm at a near impasse at the moment, so I decided to write about my experience with Unity so far. Working with it has been challenging, as I had a few initial tasks not related to Unity or programming. The other three CS students on the project got a bit of a head start over me, so they're a little more comfortable with C# and Unity than I am. Note: my programming experience has been almost completely isolated to Java. I've done a few projects in C#, LISP, and Prolog. I've taken to C# fairly quickly, as it is pretty close to Java.

As I mentioned, Unity uses components pretty heavily. I've looked back to the Morgan's Raid source code a bit to get a comparable idea of what things are trying to do in Unity, which has been pretty helpful. Some of my difficulties now remind me of last fall, when the Morgan's Raid source hierarchy was, to put it bluntly, a mess. It's hard to get my bearings when the folders are such a mess. In the next week and a half we'll have to clear up the Digital Archaeology source hierarchy (among other things) as we prepare to hand the core game off to another university group to polish and apply the visuals. A lot remains to be done, but Unity affords us the biggest chance to succeed. I am glad that we chose to work with it, and I'm happy the developer license will be mine (hopefully) to explore with over the next several months.

This is a bit premature for a review of Unity, so take it as more of a preview. I'll try to sum up my thoughts on Unity as well as the Digital Archaeology Project in a future post.