Is unity right for me?

The burning question every novice has when they find themselves in this dark corner of the ethereal.

Is unity right for my purposes?

Background: I used to mod Warcraft 3 heavily. I created mods like Vampire Hunter & Werewolf Transylvania. These games were met with relative success within the WC3 community. Unfortunately I can't monetize anything made in the WC3 editor. What I would like to do is create a stand alone version of one of these games. Now I am looking for a platform to create a stand alone with and I am trying to decide if Unity is appropriate.

Needs:

• Graphical User Interface (My programming skills are minimal)

• Templates (I'd like to have existing systems for health, damage, movement that I can make use of)

• Multiplayer Capability (These games would require minimum of 3 players, with a preferred 6-8 players)

• Terrain Palette (The ability to spray down grass/rock/sand, raise/lower terrain, place trees rapidly, etc...)

• Platform where "matches" can be found, joined and created.

Thanks guys!

 

You'd want to beef up your programming skills significantly; Unity can do whatever you program it to do. Download it and click here.

--Eric

 

Hello Poquelin

Yes, Unity is appropriate for you. All the needs which you have specified, you can achieve easily using Unity3D tool.
If you want to do minimal programming and wants to use inbuilt features or the packages available on Unity Asset Store.

For Multiplayer Functionality there are number of servers that you can used for both Realtime and Turn based Multiplayer Functionality. One of the them is Photon. While using Photon just download the sdk and import that into your Project. There is also sample scene in every sdk with the help of which you can take the overview of Multiplayer Functionality and customize that scene or Functionality with inbuilt Scripts.

Unity is easy to use if you understand the basics of the Unity. Even Unity supports many other external packages and sdks like Parse, Game Center, Chartboost, Flurry and many more and Unity is Multi Platform Engine with little changes while switching the platform.

So go for it. At end you must think that you have choose the right path.

Thanks,
Seasia Infotech

 

Like Eric says, you'll need to work on this. You probably could get a long way by mostly stitching Asset Store stuff together, but you'll still need to do the stitching.

 

Without any programming you won't get far. Either you are stuck to a game creator that is specifically for one genre and isn't very flexible or you need to apply logic either way.

Scirra's Contruct2 does a good job in making games flexible, without programming and with customizable templates for most 2D functions you'd need. Even without sctually writing code you will find that you still need to apply programming problem solving logic, though. So in the end it's not really necessarily easier. Also you can output to HTML5 only. Every supported plattform is only an emulation.

I'd say - give unity a try and see for yourself. That's the only thing to know for sure.
Personally I'd classify Unity as the most accessible yet professional engine on the market right now.

 

Hm, doesn't Construct show that you can come in fact very far without traditional programming, means without writing code? It has of course its limits. But it is especially designed to create 2D Games with it. And does this job pretty well.

Construct is not the only non - programming* tool out there. Gamemaker and Multimedia Fusion are together with Construct the most common non-programming 2D Tools out there. And non programming approach arrived at the big game engines now to. Unreal's Blueprints is non - programming.

And even in Unity you don't necessarily need to use a programming language. Have a look at Unity's Playmaker in the asset store. That's visual programming where you connect logical bricks.

* non - programming = visual scripting/programming, without the need to write code in a text editor

 

Sure, but whether you're writing code or doing the same thing other ways, at the end of the day you still need to understand the appropriate concepts to get the job done. And there are good reasons that, even with a lot of smart people looking for alternatives, writing code is still the go-to standard for the majority of use cases.

 

Still, using non programming tools is still a valid way to enter the developer world. A game is not only code. And a non programming tool lowers the barrer to learn all the other necessary things. Even programming to some degree. The logic part stays.

 

Yes... what I was trying to get at, though, is that removing the code part of programming doesn't actually stop you from having to learn all of the same stuff. The only thing that changes is the language, and making the language more visual doesn't remove the need for logic, design, etc. etc.

You're now saying "non-programming". In the post I was responding to you were talking about "traditional programming" and "writing code".

Trying to bring this back to something useful... I'd strongly suggest checking out Playmaker, and the various other packages that integrate with it. I've not ever gone that route myself, but since they're advertised to work together out of the box I'd hope that would at least minimise the boilerplate and glue work needed to integrate stuff into your game.

 

We agree here

Sometimes i edit my posts heavily after hitting the post reply button. Sorry for the loose ends ^^

 

Hence why I said:

 

My biggest concern is multiplayer capability. We want to create a client that can match you up with other players and communicate with a server that will log certain player activities (like keeping track of harvesting a resource when a player is not logged on).

 

How you handle multiplayer is going to depend on which server solution you go with. I'd recommend checking out SmartFoxServer 2X. It comes with a client API for a variety of platforms including Unity.

http://www.smartfoxserver.com/products/sfs2x

 

If your mods really are successful and you already have an established base of customers it might be better to approach a small studio. The game you are describing sounds like a lot of work for a one man team to write from the ground up.

 

The way WC3 works is that you share maps typically P2P (You download from another player in the game lobby).

So it is quite difficult to get numbers on how many downloads we actually had.
One of our website distribution sources has 18,671 downloads.
We also had a bot that would host games for people which had about 200,000 downloads.

With that said, the forum community we established is quite small at 1342 users (less than a dozen who are active).

In my mind it would be more effort and money to seek a small studio who wants to get involved than it would be to work on it myself. Small studios typically want to work on their own visions, or on a "sure thing" and our mod wouldn't qualify. It was popular but not even 1/100th as popular as mods like Dota.

 

You don't necessarily need to go with a studio or individual that will produce a finalized game. You could hire someone to simply build a prototype and then expand upon it yourself.

 

Don't bother with playmaker you'll end up just as confused if you don't know what the code does in the first place.

 

It may still work as a way to learn programming if it has the same basics (conditions, loops, etc) without forcing the user to deal with braces, semicolons, etc. I have yet to actually sit down and experiment with it though I am planning on trying to pick it up at some point.

 

Consider that any tool robust enough to circumvent scripting may take just as long to learn as scriping, and it will probably be more limited. You dont have to be john carmack to script effectively in Unity. Perhaps just bite the bullet and watch all the unity programming tuts. They're awesome and learning programming is extremely fun imo. I didn't really know how to code a few years ago but I learned on unity.

 

You're not circumventing scripting though. You're simply creating your scripts by placing nodes and using wires to direct the flow rather than writing lines of text. It isn't too dissimilar from a flowchart when you get down to it. Albeit one you don't have to convert to code once you've designed.