Comments on: Unity’s Nicholas Francis On Making Tech Simple

By: Susan

Susan — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:02:55 +0000

I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

Susan

http://dclottery.info

By: Joe Robins

Joe Robins — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:35:40 +0000

@Karry:

As an Artist myself I can see your point of view, but this is where Unity really shines.. I started using Unity with practically no programming experience whatsoever, within 3 months of starting and with some fantastic help from the community (an aspect of Unity that often goes un-praised) I had a fully working game up and running for a client and was really pleased with the results. So my response to you would be, pick up Unity, get involved in the community and with a bit of effort you will soon have your own art assets flying around the screen with a huge grin on your face :D

By: Digit

Digit — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:34:23 +0000

I hadn’t touched a language prior to Unity, though I have worked in the games industry for ~6 years, and I took 30 days to checkout the trial, and had a working prototype of my game in C# on day 26. I used another engine which shall not be named for fear of summoning it’s dark powers prior to Unity, and in around 3 months had what effectively amounted to -nothing- to show for my time. So I really approached Unity -very- carefully at the start but am totally sold on it now.

By: AngryAnt

AngryAnt — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 09:40:00 +0000

@bill: That’s a shot from the Cartoon Network title FusionFall – made with Unity.

By: gnoblin

gnoblin — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 09:47:52 +0000

Unity is a great engine!
I would not use anything else ).

By: iamseb

iamseb — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 19:42:18 +0000

@karry – I’ve seen all too often the hopes that someone who isn’t a coder might have to make a game, but it’s just not feasible to do so without some technical capability. Unity goes further than most game builder packages I’ve used to try to close the gap, but it’s still true that there’s a gap between artist and developer, and it’s a gap that no tool I’ve ever used can fully bridge.

I’ve been evaluating Unity for a little while with the aim of iPhone and browser-based games and it’s very impressive indeed. A far cry from the utter mess that I got into trying to make Torque do what I wanted, considerably more powerful than flash, and a thousand times less work than writing my own engine. (I’ve written 3 extremely limited game engines, and several mods for different engines, accounting for about 5 years of elapsed effort.)

My only real concern so far has been the apparent scarcity of guided learning tools for Unity. There are 2 tutorials which are great, but reasonably limited in scope, and (unless I can’t find them) very few how-to guides, meaning that the learning experience involves lots of dry API documentation.

By: Sunjammer

Sunjammer — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 16:54:30 +0000

C# is a universe apart from C++. A universe. C++ is a language even seasoned developers think is difficult and weird. C# is a hawaiian sea breeze of love and zen by comparison.

By: Sunjammer

Sunjammer — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 16:53:16 +0000

About the coding thing; I’m used to object oriented techniques, so i naturally gravitate towards the C# stuff (lovely, lovely language, and hello Visual studio!), but you can do a lot of really cool things in Unity with simple javascript-style behavior scripts you can just layer and stack to tweak behaviors. The beauty of Unity is really its component model, and how easy it is to combine behaviors.

Again, don’t be scared of it. It’s bastard simple stuff.

By: Sunjammer

Sunjammer — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 16:50:48 +0000

We use Unity3D for a project at work, and being a 10 year Flash developer with a fair amount of Maya experience, it’s really amazing stuff to jump into, so much so it frankly makes the attempts at 3d worlds in flash look a bit daft.

Then again, Unity3d is very 3d, and is rather poor at 2d content. The GUI stuff in particular is almost impossible to enjoy coming from a Flash background.

Thousand thumbs up. Everyone interested in game dev and game prototyping should get a trial and play around.

By: Matt Diamond

Matt Diamond — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 16:32:49 +0000

@Karry:
As you point out, the need for programming has not gone away with Unity. But wat was meant by the “you don’t have to be a C++ developer..” quote is that you don’t have to be MUCH of a programmer to do quite a lot with Unity. As an artist who also knows how to use a computer, I believe you yourself could accomplish a lot because the amount of code one needs to write in Unity is often rather small. For example, you could start an animation you imported, play a sound, or move an object in 1-3 lines of code. (Unity also comes with some useful scripts out of the box for things like first-person character movement.)

As a non-coder, you may be used to thinking of programming as an esoteric black box, that you either know how to do or not. But in fact coding ranges from very simple to complex. If you’ve ever typed formulas in a spreadsheet then you are already on the path without realizing it.

That’s why other responders have tried to draw a distinction for you between scripting in C# and coding in C#. Even though the syntax is the same, the experience is very different. Almost anyone can learn to write the few lines of Javascript or C# code sufficient to tell an object in Unity to do something important. Very few of those people would be able to write the hundreds or thousands of lines necessary for a game from scratch.

The proof is in the pudding: I’ve seen quite a few programmer-artists in the Unity forums who, before Unity, had never written a single line of code. Most of them don’t consider themselves coders now, but what little they needed, they learned how to do.

As for your comment that coders could just as easily write their own engine anyway: I myself am an experienced programmer but the last thing I’d want to do now is write my own game engine. I’ve spent months of my spare time in the past writing games from scratch, and most of that was just writing code that had been written by others thousands of times already: load models from file, play sounds, read player input. Boring. I’m much happier using someone else’s code for those things, and instead concentrating on making my games better. My Unity games are much better than my from-scratch games, run on more platforms, and took much less time to write.

Hope that helps.

By: Karry

Karry — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 08:55:38 +0000

@Sharkwald:
But see, all these game engines brag about how they’re so easy even a child can make games in minutes, when in fact you have to be a coder, and if you are a coder – you can just as easily write your own engine instead, which i undesrtand many people actually prefer.

By: bill

bill — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 08:37:09 +0000

what’s that last pic? I have a sudden hope for a jet-grind-radio clone…