Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Unity 3D
Unity 3D is a cross-platform engine developed by Unity Technologies, which can be
used to create games for desktop PCs, the Web, consoles, and mobile devices. It
is the most popular game engine used by game developers today (especially indie
teams) and the one that first offered to small, indie developers the opportunity to de-
velop their projects with a professional, almost full-featured tool coming with a low
cost, and thus affordable license. It can be said that if we've got so many almost-free
engines available today, a big chunk of the credit goes to the success of Unity.
The engine is written in C/C++ (thus allowing extension of its capabilities with extern-
al libraries) and supports scripting through JavaScript, C#, and Boo. The Version 4.0
is the latest update to the tool and it comes in two main licenses as we write; the free
license with limited capabilities and the Pro license, which costs $1500 and offers all
the features supported by the engine. Still, with the Pro version of Unity 3D, separ-
ate licenses are required to create builds for Android, iOS, and Adobe Flash Player.
You can refer to the following link for a detailed description of the different license
available and their costs:
https://store.unity3d.com/
. With a cost of $1500 for the Pro
version, the Unity 3D full-featured license, which allows creating game builds for the
mobile market is not cheap, when compared to its competitors!
On the other hand, there are several features supported by Unity such as post-pro-
cessing, physics, bump and reflection mapping, ambient occlusion, dynamic shad-
ows, and render to texture functions, among the others.
The interface is very intuitive and the actions required to create assets and so-called
Prefabs (game assets that can be instantiated at will into the game) are handled with
extreme simplicity; you perform most of the actions through a drag-and-drop inter-
face, which for example allows adding a script to control the behavior of a game ob-
ject by simply dragging the script on the game object itself in the editor window.
There are many reasons that help make Unity 3D the perfect tool for a mobile indie
team. Its interface is intuitive and very easy to grasp. The editor is quite powerful and
allows to quickly prototype game mechanics with few mouse clicks. Unity 3D sup-
ports all major 3D file formats,
*.fbx
in particular, so that you can easily work with
professional software such as 3D Studio Max or Maya, and then import the result in
Unity without compatibility problems. Support is really strong, both by the community
of users, which is always ready to provide the answers to any problem you may face