The Future Is Unity?

After spending a few weeks learning about PBE I’ve decided that even though the devs there are great guys, responsive to questions in both forums and IRC, and doing fantastic engine work (all true!), I think I really need a game platform that’s more mature and ready to work “out of the box” for what I’m trying to do right now, which is producing and publishing a few (relatively small) RPG games quickly to start building community feedback and further developing the Arcanoria mythos and backstory.

So I started looking at other options a week or so ago! What I found was that I had incredibly good timing to start looking for a new engine. Unity 3D have decided to make their base model engine package free. I’ve always been impressed with Unity, and might have used it 3 years ago when I first started getting involved in game development, except for the fact that I’m a PC guy and Unity was only available for Mac at the time. However, they now have a PC version, and with last week’s bombshell announcement about their Indie package becoming free to use, I decided to give it a spin.

In short, I’ve been incredibly impressed with Unity! I can hardly believe how polished it is, including the website, wiki, tutorials and documentation, and engine stability. Furthermore, the Unity community is nothing short of amazingly helpful. The forums are frequented by 300-500 users concurrently at most times, and the IRC almost always has 80-100 people online, chatting up the engine and answering questions in a very friendly and supportive way.

Unfortunately this means there will be a short break in development while I learn more about Unity, but I’m very optimistic that we’ll be able to produce great results quickly, as many other Unity developers have done before me. I’ll put together a revised timeline soon and post about it here.