A simple farm app

Sorry if I'm posting in the wrong forum. I'm an experienced game artist/designer but I am brand new to Unity. I have installed it and have begun watching tutorials but before I go further I want to ask and hopefully get answers to a few questions. I'm hoping to confirm that Unity is indeed a good tool for creating an Android app that a small team and myself are creating. From what I have learned so far, I assume it is, but have this nagging worry in the back of my head that I'll run into a limitation after we've already committed. It's a very simple farming game with a humanitarian purpose. Here are the basic features:

1. A very simple 3D environment similar to the one Zynga created for Farmville 2 but much simpler. Basically a flat ground with vertical 'cards' sticking off of the ground that have 2D plant textures on them, with a few background planes for mountains, sky and clouds. The camera will always be facing the same direction except for possibly a slight tilt up and down. One thing I'm not sure about is if the cards need to face the camera as it changes tilt. That may be something I need.
2. Some of the plants will need to animate. Imagine a small corn plant (2D image on a card) that animates up into a full size corn stalk. I imagine this will be a combination of playing through multiple frames of of the 2D plant texture while at the same time animating the size of the 3D card (and probably animating a swaying type of motion on the card for extra polish).
3. At certain moments I will need to trigger an animation that represents different kinds of weather. Like rain for example. I don't know what the best way to do this will be but I'm open to ideas. Could be a 2D-ish solution with animated cards with rain drops texgtured on them. Or could be that using a particle system work given that the rest of the environment will be fairly simple.

So the questions are:
- Is Unity a good tool for creating an app like this?
- Does anyone have any suggestions or tutorials you could point me to for how to pull these features off using Unity?

Thanks! Any help is greatly appreciated!!
Tyler

 

Yes Unity is more than a good tool to create this app. Unity is very flexible and can be used to make almost any game. It's a game engine, not a game maker, so you need to implement all the features of your game, but you may find some solutions to this on the asset store.

 

Thank you. A follow-up question: When you say it's "more than a good tool" and it's not a "game maker so you need to implement all the features", I can't help but wonder if there is a better tool/engine out there to create an app as simple as the one I'm creating. Let me ask it this way. Imagine you were creating an app that only did the following (BTW, this is not my design. This is an extremely simplified example to help me ask the question.)...

1. You see a very simple landscape, made with a flat textured ground with upright cards for plants and a couple background layers. The bushes and trees might be subtly moving back and forth as if blowing in the breeze.


2. A UI menu appears over top of the landscape giving you a choice of what kind of food you want to grow. You tap the 'corn' option. The menu goes away and the camera zooms in on a small plot of soil. A bunch of small corn plants suddenly grow out of the ground.


3. A clock icon appears on the screen. You tap it and time seems to fast forward as you see rain fall and sun shine. After that you see the small corn plants suddenly all grow up into full stalks of corn.

4. An icon representing 'harvest' appears on screen. You tap it and now you see all the corn stalks appearing as if they were just cut down and animating and swirling towards the center of the field then suddenly transforming into bags of corn.

5. You tap the bags of corn and they suddenly fly up towards the upper corner of the screen where they increase your 'corn counter'.

6. The camera zooms back out to the view you first started with. The end.

As explained here, it's almost just an interactive video. But, there would be a few different kinds of weather you could get, as well as a few different yield results in the crop, etc. I would be creating my models and animations in Maya. And maybe there's a reason to use a vector animation tool like Adobe Animate (Flash). I'm already experienced with these programs. Sorry to go on long here, but if anyone has any helpful tips or comments I would really appreciate it.

 

It's useful to understand what a game engine is, and what it is not. That's easier to understand if you've ever tried programming something (even something as simple as an interactive video) from total scratch using nothing but code.

With a game engine, you don't have to handle the resource pipeline yourself. You don't have to handle rendering every frame, or maintain a clock that manages that rendering cycle. You don't have to perform checks on and make calls to the GPU directly. Unity (and other modern game engines) have the added advantage of including lots of built-in features you may or may not need, like physics engines, special shaders, collision detection, and anything you can imagine through the Asset Store. And even better, publishing your app on multiple platforms is a few clicks, rather than having to totally rewrite all your code.

So there are obvious benefits, but are there drawbacks? Sure. Depending on what you want to accomplish, Unity may be a bit more cumbersome to learn to use effectively than something like perhaps InDesign. If you don't plan on using any of the features a game engine provides, it might be overkill.

That being said, even for a simple 2D game, using Unity could potentially provide enough benefits that it'd be worth the learning curve. I recommend you watch a few 2D tutorials and see if the workflow looks like something you could handle, and if so, download and give it a go.

 

That helps a lot. Thanks.