If unity didnt exist...

I came across Unity while I was searching how to develop video games for android, after I learnt JavaScript. So if it didn't exist I would have probably went for another engine.

 

Well I'm currently not using Unity for game dev. It's a great game engine just one that I could never "connect" with. I originally found Unity when I was developing in C# & XNA and MS decided to abandon it. In hindsight that obviously wasn't needed considering Stardew Valley was created with C# & XNA. Plus I had made a fair amount of dev tools. Ah well.

Basically I don't care what I am using as long as it works for me. There's so many options out there and always have been numerous things from Blitz to Allegro to GLBasic to SFML to stuff like Ogre, etc and these days so many options to list them all would probably fill a thread of its own. If a person wants to create games they will find something some way to do it imo.

 

I'd probably be using Unreal if Unity didn't exist. I actually started out trying to use UDK but found it to be a little difficult in learning (young age), tried CryEngine and it was worse for my little mind, went to little "Creator" engines here and there, was gonna go back to Udk and suck it up and that's when I found Unity. I think it was just hitting 3.2 or 3.3 when I found it. I loved every aspect of it and UnityScript was easy for me to learn. C# was even easier. So if Unity didn't exist, I'd be using Unreal4 right now.

 

Right around the time XNA was closing down I caught wind that Unity had a free option available. I jumped on board and now it's my goto for every game and even some non-game apps...

If it didn't exist, then perhaps XNA would still be around, and I'd be tinkering with that, but if unreal had been the first to go indie friendly, I'd probably be over there linking nodes together and crap.

 

Wow. Now that is quite a question, isn't it?

I started coding in high school. After graduating I hadn't coded in five years, I had other stuff going on. A friend suggested that if I were interested in game dev, I should pick up Unity. I picked it up and gave up soon enough, it wasn't entirely in my interest at the time. I just wanted to play games and waste my time. There came a point when I realized gaming no longer made me happy. I picked up Unity that fall to figure out if I could do anything interesting with it. A friend eventually told me to turn it in to a game. My Associate's degree came to a dead end. I decided the major wasn't for me, and decided to pursue something of keen interest to me still. Computer Science. Now I had not much of an idea about that at the time, but three years on I've found a liking for it. I thought it would be a lot of coding, instead it was a lot of math and science (go figure!). If I hadn't had that renewed interest in coding thanks to Unity, I really don't know where I might be now.

One thing's for sure though, I'm sick of wasting my time on this Earth. I think I'd have come to that conclusion eventually. Coming to this University has helped me develop not only professionally and and academically, it has also opened up a lot of opportunity, and helped me to grow personally, though not directly. You gotta crack a few eggs to make an omelette.

A bit of advice: if you want to be a professional, ie. an engineer, get a degree, you will be well rounded upon graduation. If you want to just code things and don't care how well you do them (Ie. its a hobby), stick to what you're doing. That internet nonsense about "You gotta code outside of classes to get anywhere" is garbage advice given by people who don't know what they're talking about. You will get plenty of coding experience in school, among other skills.

 

Either unreal or godot or maybe there would be some open source alternative available.

 

My recollection is there was definitely a migration from XNA to Unity. Many years ago UnityAnswers was getting quite a few Q's "I can do X in XNA, how do I do it in Unity?" I feel like it happened after Unity was already becoming popular with beginners.

But I don't think XNA had a chance, or was meant to. This was back when windows/PC was the main place to make games. Microsoft's strategy was to help out X-Box. Direct-X/XNA was how they were hoping to do it -- the whole point was to encourage you to only make games for PC and X-Box. Of course, the explosion of mobile, and microsoft with nothing in the phone market, upset that.