Are we a dying breed?...

Unity is by far (IMO), the best game development engine available (all around/functionality). Why is it that 3D games/devs (1st/3rd person 3D), are a rare thing now-a-days?. I come here to see the latest developed with Unity, but 90% is 2D mobile games?.

Not a hater of 2D, but there seems to be a shift in game dev lately. So us 3D devs look like a dying breed/dinosaur, rare. Anyone else kinda feel the same?. I know 2D is an over-saturated market, with very low success rate, but whats the appeal?. Am i a dinosaur?, lol...

Very viable question...

 

I would recommend to go to steam and check "new releases" then see how many 3d gams are there.

I'm not seeing a significant shift towards 2d, but I'm seeing more stylyzed 3d graphics.

For example ("Know by Heart"):

Spoiler

Personally, I think that t here's no point in worrying over what's trendy, as long as you can do what you want to do.

 

I think it is not rare. At least in the grand scheme of things.

But, in general, proper 3D action game is much harder to make than a 2D one (and 2D is not simple at all at the begin with).

4244 titles are tagged with 3D and Engine.Unity tags. SteamDB link.

 

It's not a viable question for a few reasons:

1. Confirmation bias. You started with a conclusion and you're trying to work your way towards it
2. This isn't new. 2D games are less expensive to produce and require less robust hardware to run
3. 2D games are, generally speaking, less complex and attract dramatically wider audiences
4. 2D is the easiest medium to rapidly churn out games based on preexisting frameworks. Note how many 2D mobile games are literally reskins by the same company
5. The Great Filter. The dramatic differences in complexity means that simple 2D games will always be more likely to be finished than simple 3D games

This is just pointless worrying. Nothing has fundamentally changed.

 

I would add that 2D games are much easier to stylize with a certain 'look'. It's always been harder to make a 3D game look like your 3D game. I think this is going to be even more obvious as tools make it easier to use photogrammetry and to make photo realistic humans. It's already having an 'everything looks the same' feeling to me in the various demos that I see.

 

Regardless of your opinion, the vast majority of developers think that Unreal is better for 3D first/third person games.

 

A lot of it has to do with the explosion of the "casual market". You can make a quick vegetables slicing game for phone and make as much money as you can making a game that a smaller hardcore group of gamers would enjoy.

Angry birds killed Tribes.

Shazbot.

 

Somehow I don't think Angry Birds has anything to do with Hi-Rez mismanaging Tribes: Ascend.

 

I would say this is also wrong unless you are working from a very specific definition of 3D.

 

This forum is a bad indicator of industry trends. I'd estimate less than 1% of Unity devs post here, and pretty close to 0% of non-Unity devs.

Edit: just out of curiosity I went down every post on the first page of both the WIP and Made with Unity forums and the overwhelming majority of projects were in 3D.

 

For mobile games Unity dominates, and 2D is popular on mobile. That's probably why you would see a lot of Unity projects in 2D.

 

Keep in mind mobile games market is larger than console and pc COMBINED.

Also, unity is by far the best engine to make mobile games on.

So it’s no surprise at all to me that this is the case.

As for 2d, I think many people (falsely) assume it’s easier, faster, and cheaper.

 

Also, as a fellow Tribes lover I think Smite had more to do with it.

Tribes has a very high learning curve and is unplayable on console. It was always doomed to fail.

 

So where all this unity devs gets their answers for their questions ?

 

In the manual, script reference, and through overcoming their problems by themselves.

 

There is usually no time for all this in the industry.
I would say that people do not go out of the box just use obvious things.
This approach makes unity bearable.

 

Unity also has such a large history online that you do find A LOT of stuff online already. Many key components have not changed that much.

And yeah, you gotta work with the engine - not against it. "Obvious things" is quite a relative term and Unity's "box" is fairly large. You can still do so much magic and aren't limited to specific game genres or anything like that.

 

i feel attacked, lol.

Honestly though, people making mobile games are likely not following their passion. They are more likely pursuing a method of making money in places where things like quick mobile games are a good venue for work.

To be completely explicit, this is not a criticism at all, but the core reason I stopped perusing game dev (and c#) as a career was taking a look at Fiverr.com.

There are leagues of people in countries with far less opportunities than here in the US and are simply more driven to make it work for far less pay.

Again, not a criticism.

I was neck deep into getting an MS cert, saw that, and googled “top paying trades” the same day.

I make good money now and can keep this as a hobby, but I know when I’m licked.

Also, trades pay insanely well if you want an out.

I make way more than many of my irl friends in dev without a huge student loan.

Im on course to break $100k this year as a locksmith.

 

You all keep talking about how great Unity is for mobiles, which is funny because Unity is notoriously slow to support various mobile platform requirements, and those usually only get added in the latest tech releases. Unity is also often buggy the minute you do something a little less mainstream.

And is generally a crappy experience, since you are forced to update to new Unity versions to comply with new requirements which means spending a lot of time dealing with breaking changes and Unity has a lot of those, even when going from LTS to LTS.

If mobile is where a Unity shines, Unity is doomed.

I think you can rephrase it a bit to make it valid, “Unity is great when you don’t care about what you’re making it with it”, in which case sure…

 

At some point you'll start asking questions that communities will not answer.
I think this is when you reach "intermediate" level, but that's my assessment, and it might be off.
At that point you either figure it out yourself, or pay someone else to solve it.

If you're the industry, then you're on "pay someone else to deal with it" course.
----
Here's some examples:

Spoiler

https://forum.unity.com/threads/dual-contouring-are-there-opensource-implementations.1269281/
https://forum.unity.com/threads/opensource-vr-hardware-again.1251363/
https://forum.unity.com/threads/properly-loading-libc-_shared-so-in-app-with-native-plugins.1240987/
https://forum.unity.com/threads/create-a-folder-and-write-data-into-a-file-within-it.1232848/
https://forum.unity.com/threads/has...custom-solution-instead-of-cardboard.1231560/
https://forum.unity.com/threads/estimate-cpu-load-on-android-api-level-29.1229700/
https://forum.unity.com/threads/goo...id-attr-dialogcornerradius-not-found.1229691/
https://forum.unity.com/threads/unable-to-use-camera-setstereoviewmatrix-in-instanced-mode.1217127/
https://forum.unity.com/threads/make-editor-auto-start-steamvr-or-oculus.1208683/

Basically, not receiving any help is normal. That's why I spoke about manual, script reference and solving it yourself. The community help is sort of training wheels, meaning you'll only receive assistance when you're dealing with something simple. When you hit more complex territory, the wheels will come off and roll away into sunset, laughing at you.

Exceptions exist (example: https://forum.unity.com/threads/hole-shader-in-urp.1176836/ ), but
they're not common.

So you really should be prepared to solve problems with nobody being there to help you.

 

The vast majority of common / basic questions have been asked and answered many times. These people don't need to be visible to find those answers. If they search properly, they'll find it.

But also, these people are professionals working in teams with other professionals. It's entirely likely that there's more reliable access to skills, knowledge and experience available within their work team than they would find by searching online. Keep in mind that these are people who either have, or work with people who have, multiple years of full-time experience often starting with either experienced mentors, a formal education, or both. I don't ask for assistance online often because most of the time a colleague helps me solve things in a timely fashion.

Google, StackExchange, forums and so on are great resources... unless you already have access to better resources.

If you're in the industry then there's a good chance that the team you're in has at least one or two people with sufficient experience to solve stuff for themselves and, hopefully, upskill the people they're helping while they're at it. So, hopefully, it's already being paid for.

To the contrary. Experienced professionals know that they don't have time not to read the docs, and that investing in their ability to solve new problems for themselves is a fundamental necessity. Otherwise, what do they do once they're past the level of available tutorials and reference books?

As developers our job is to make new stuff, not just to regurgitate what people have done before us. I don't think that such people are a dying breed, but certainly they're a quiet minority in places like this.

 

To be the best at something you don't need to be actually good at it, you just need to be better than the rest. Which has been the case for Unity on mobile for a long time: the alternatives all have their own multitudes of problems, even if they outshine Unity in specific areas.

 

Maybe people are getting smarter about biting off more than they can chew. A 3D game with realistic graphics is much more difficult than a mobile game. A multiplayer 3D game with realistic graphics is very difficult to make. After being here for many many years... I think it is a good sign that more people are starting out making mobile 2d games. It was not many years ago when you would almost weekly get a thread like ' I want to make a realistic 3d MMORPG, Do I need to learn C#'...

 

I doubt it, Unity used to be all about mobile games, maybe I've stopped paying attention to that but it seems like everyone has shifted to Steam, and that generally means more 3D stuff.

 

A 3D game of any sort is much more difficult than a 2D game of any sort 99% of the time.

And yet they're still dramatically faster than much of the competition in mobile spaces unless you're working with the traditional definition of a game engine (a collection of related APIs).

See above. This is not even remotely a Unity exclusive problem.

Again, see above. This is not a Unity unique experience as somebody who has dealt with multiple engines deploying to multiple platforms. In fact...

This is actually way off base. Unity shines specifically because it is currently the best engine for targeting a wide array of platforms, from mobile to desktop to console. If you want to push a game to multiple platforms, Unity is still your best bet and will be for a long time. Unreal's multiplatform tools are getting there, but they're still eons away.

?????

That's literally the definition of a kitchen sink game engine. It is meant to facilitate a wide array of types and deployment to multiple platforms.

 

I don't get it. Almost all the top charting android games are 3D.