Made a Mac/iOS strategy game, now learning unity

Hello all -

I am making a focused effort to learn Unity and am excited to be doing this. My first real game is a casual turn based strategy game for iOS. I haven't 100% gotten it on iOS so right now its on Mac OS desktop. My plan is to get it on iOS and then switch to my 3D game idea.

Some things I learned from making the strategy game:

- I think something like Unity is what I should have done initially. I programmed my strategy game in Objective C/C. I more or less ended up making a mini game engine and wasted a lot of time. The final end product is so completely different from where I started.

- Simple is better. When making a game your mindset tends to easily go into "keep adding more complexity." But if your game has any AI behavior, the AI has to be adjusted. Its easy to add new units to a strategy game - making the AI make effective use of them can be a time consuming process. As a result, I ended up only having three units in my casual game's initial release. I wanted to be sure the AI played the three units well. By having it be only three units, its also an easier game and better fits my casual strategy game goal.

- Don't do AI in code. It took me years to make a good AI system that is scalable. Think in terms of units on a map in a strategy game. If you hard code your AI in your source code, its very difficult to scale up, scale down, or make changes. What several years of iterations (I am a hobbyist, not even part time) got me was an AI system - the game reads in a .txt file upon making a new map. The .txt files tell it what other .txt files to read in for unit attributes, and also unit AI (if its human controlled of course these don't matter.

The AI text files are behavior trees. It has nodes ordered in a text file - but they can be out of order. They are followed by their priority listing. So I can type in priority 1.1 anywhere and it creates a list thats ordered based on their priority number. The highest priority node whose condition is true is executed.

Its easier to work with and visualize than hard coding.

Anyways, my next project will be a 3D game and I intend to carry over what I learned in making an AI system into that project. I have a good idea of what I want to make. I intend to buy assets on the unity store as opposed to contracting out an artist like I did last time. I think that would be better to make a minimum viable product.