Yeah that title is kinda weird, right? Well that’s my background. I wrote Mrs. Riley’s PageBuilder with Flex and was a Technical Artist for Vicarious Visions for over 3 years, working with a lot of awesome 3D technologies including VV’s Alchemy and 3DSMax while making games there. I’ve always wanted to work on my own game – as far back as college. The problem has always been finding a toolset that has the capabilities in 3D to take advantage of my art skills while isolating me from the real nitty gritty engine coding duties that are far too involved for me to tackle alone.
A few years back I came across the Unity engine when it was Mac only. I was pretty interested, but it’s only recently that I’ve started to really have a go at it and so far, I’m impressed. Unity is very visual. A scene has a hierarchy of objects that all have a visual representation in the world – some more as proxies to code, some as real 3d assets. But that organizational difference is really important for my way of thinking and learning. I suspect that there are a lot of other folks that feel the same way because it’s really gained traction over the past year. And of course it doesn’t hurt that they provide a version for developing iPhone games.
So, my first few hours have been spent going over tutorials. Unity provides a few projects with nicely written PDF tutorials here. So far I’ve spent time with only the 2D Platform Tutorial. It’s just a simple character on a couple platforms along with controller logic, physics, particles, a skybox, and some UI. Ok so, maybe not that simple. In fact, what I really want to find is a dead simple hello world type tutorial. I’d like to create a terrain, import a model from Max, hook up some kind of control via the keyboard, and move the model around the world. I don’t even care if the camera follows around this point. I’ve looked for a few minutes and haven’t seen anything so far.
So that’s the next post. Right now though I haven’t been this excited by a piece of software since I drove up to Toronto with my Dad in 1996 to get a copy of 3DSMax 1.0 Educational. (it was $995 Canadian) That was the best investment of my career and I have a feeling that Unity will be another great one.
Your post does encourage me to explore Unity, i’ve downloaded the trial version but didn’t find time yet to use it (as it’s only 30 days of trial i have to choose the right time because i’m pretty busy at work with Flash)
Hope to read more from your experience soon