Ten years with Unity

Ten years ago today, I joined this crazy forum.

Before we came over to Unity we'd been using the A3 and A4 versions of 3D Game Studio from Conitec. Before that we'd used Quest 3D, Flash, Torque, GameMaker, 3DRad, and some other game engines, for various projects. I was sort of an engine hopper back then. Whenever it was time to do a new project I'd look around the the engine that was capable of doing what I wanted to do. They all had their pros and cons.

When I found Unity it was exactly what I was looking for. Pretty much all of the engines available back then cost from several hundred dollars on up to use commercially. Nothing free that was worth the hassle (that I knew of). We (my dev partner/wife and I) bought the "Indie" version for $199 and then upgraded to "Pro" for an additional $880 a few months later once our new project was fully in progress.

So it's been ten years, and we're still using Unity, as we speak, on a new game that will hopefully be finished within a month. I keep thinking of changing to something else, not because I don't like Unity but simply because I'd like a change of scenery. Every time I give it more thought, though, I end up realizing that what I want to do can be done in Unity so I keep using it.

Anyway, What brought you to Unity? What engine(s) were you using before you came over? What are your Unity pros and cons that will either keep you using it or try something else in the future?

 

Back when I started I was using directX and openGL, and then hopped over to ogre3d.

The reason I hopped over was because it went free and had a level editor. The pros is your going to save alot of time on development you have a full team working on the engine, the con is that if you hit a hard limit (IE you cant free memory in webGL without reloading the scene -- you are SOL). Right now we are working on building our own SAAS AR platform "web editor" using unity so its come full circle...

I think you might be better off over the long term to roll your own for everything but who knows.

 

I fiddled with XNA, GameMaker, and a handful of other "easy button" solutions that turned out to be "not so easy button solutions".. unity was the first game engine that was solid, effective and useful for what I was trying to do, and I've looked at unreal since then, as well as some of these newer ones, godot and such.... none compare as far as I can tell.

 

Unity was the main competition, so it made sense to use the competition's product to attempt to make our's better.

Torque, Unreal

Pros: C#, great integration with my favorite art tool (Spine), I have friends at Unity I want to support, and I really like the community.

 

I joined the forums 9 years ago, but had been lurking for a long time before that.

I'd started an indie project along with a programmer after we'd been made redundant. It was the third time I'd been made redundant from a game designer role, so thought going indie couldn't be less stable. The programmer ended up busy with contract work, so while waiting I tried developing on my own.

GameSalad was what I tried first as my programming skills were almost non-existent. But I soon realised I'd need to use something more powerful, and Unity was the only practical option I could see. I taught myself Unity and Javascript (as most of the tutorials were in JS back then), and a year later I released my first game to disappointing sales, and again a year later for my second game. The joint project was never completed.

I have flirted with other game engines, mostly Cocos, but stuck with Unity when I started a part-time job as a university lecturer on a Games Computing course. Multiple modules involved teaching Unity, so it made sense to continue using it myself.

The lecturing took up more time than I expected, and got involved in a few projects over the years, so haven't released a game myself in a long time, but I have two I hope to have finished by the end of the summer (one is really a sequel to my first game, and have used it to experiment, and it has changed a lot).

 

The Steve Jobs “Thoughts on Flash” memo happened. I immediately began looking for an escape hatch that wasn’t an HTML5 library.

That’s when I remembered a very old Flash meetup I’d been to where one of the attendees was raving about a “3D Flash Killer” called Unity3D. I remembered trying it the evening he mentioned it, but back then it shipped with Unitron as its editor and everything was in UnityScript. Nothing made sense. However by the time “Thoughts on Flash” made the rounds the tool was much better supported. We had MonoDevelop, which to my eyes at the time was a blessing.

It’s been history from there.

 

I'm a youngun, relatively speaking. By the time I started playing with Unity seriously, it was really the only valid option around. Unreal was still super expensive and only really suitable for FPS games. And Unity had massively eclipsed all of the other free/cheap engines in capacity.

By the time Unreal dropped its prices, I was too well trained in Unity to be worth making the switch. I'm basically here for the long run. I can really only see myself switching if Unity really screws up badly.

 

I think I'm on my fith year, not sure. I was renovating and wanted to visualize my apartment in VR. I went with unity becasue it had good support for Oculus DK1.

Then Vive came out and I decided to create a VR game.

 

I got into games in the early social game days, using a lot of flash, which eventually lead me to working on more complex stuff and Unity.

The main reason I liked Unity was I agreed with their big picture approach of use higher level languages where possible and drop to C++ only when necessary. But for years the choices and implementations, non focus on performance, was a real issue. Now with performance as a priority and burst, I think we are seeing how well the paradigm can actually work if done right, and I'm fairly happy with Unity right now.

 

I'm afraid my answer won't be that spectacular

I was playing a game that had been made with Unity (back in 2011, good ol' WebPlayer). That's how I've discovered Unity and this forum.

None.

Pros: Easy to use. I've tried Unreal and CryEngine once and they were kinda cumbersome...
Cons: Don't really have one (yet).

 

I disliked Unity before I ever ended up using it as a game engine.. mainly because I'd grown a certain distaste with PC games using the Unity engine, and all having the same problems of not supporting fullscreen mode properly ie worse performance....an issue that has since been fixed years ago now, among other issues and common things you see with Unity made games.

So it had a reputation that proceeded it, but it was also on my radar as a game engine because of it.. Think it was 2015 Unity5 when I tried it out and finally got experience see all the effing problems developers of certain games I liked had problems and bugs with... because now I had them aswel So I did try Unreal out at a similar time actually before Unity even, but soon got into Unity because of its C# support/asset store.. Unreal fell by the way side, I lost interest, but still like seeing the new releases and what they support in features compared to Unity.

Of course I made some games with Flash many years before 2015, Map making for Quake3 is roughly when I started getting into game modding.

 

Flash was awesome! Had spent most of my career working with it right up until just a few ago years maintaining legacy products. It's a real shame one person killed such a highly productive and flexible tool and consequently destroyed the careers of those involved with it - I know many.

I sought Unity as an alternative too. UE was way too expensive at the time and tho I've played with it since I definitely prefer Unity for its similar qualities to Flash.


So, long live Unity!

 

I've been here for a while. Even before creating my forum account. I used to just come here and read to learn about the engine usage. I used opengl, flash, xna, and unreal before taking a leap of faith to Unity.

Back then on Unity 3 I didn't do much since I was still working on other engine projects, but what made me come back was the interface. I really liked how organized and easy to use it was compared to my previous experiences, so I made the jump with Unity 4. Have been working with it since then both as a hobby and as my job.

I don't have any plans to move to any other engine. Not now with all the amazing new toys that Unity is giving us while still being the same engine.

 

My team trialed it on a project in my absence. I didn't like it at first. However, it did help the team to get contracts finished more quickly, so we kept using it. Eventually both Unity and I changed enough that it's now my default toolkit for anything that involves a 3D scene.

We had an in-house toolkit using a bunch of Open Source libraries, most notably OGRE. Before that I also had experience with Torque, XNA, and good ol' C++/SDL/OpenGL.

Pros

• The biggest one is support for lots of platforms. I do not want to have to maintain a toolset and runtime across multiple platforms myself. I also don't want to have to learn different tools for different platforms.
• Decent base editor tools, which are extendable. They're not perfect, but they don't need to be.
• Someone else maintaining my engine! Back when iOS went 64 bit only that could have been a major headache at short notice, but thanks to Unity it was a fairly minor one.
• "Free" engine upgrades. Every so often Unity does something cool that will improve my game and just gives it to me. I can focus on my games rather than on keeping the underlying tech up to date.

Cons

• Scripts must be attached to GameObjects. This is more a background thing these days as I'm used to just dealing with it, and I have to admit that it does give things a certain elegance in its consistency. However, I'd love for a scene or application to be able to have some scripting hooks which are not dependent on GameObjects. Without this, certain things end up getting hacky solutions.
• Garbage collection is worth a mention. Thanks to my experience in XNA I'm used to just dealing with it from the code design stage onwards, but I do have to admit that it'd be nice not to have to. There are also some things in large scale games (eg: arbitrarily streaming game content) that are impractical to do without allocating.
• The glacial rate of change for some specific things is just... ugh. Why is the built-in Input system so archaic? Why did a replacement make it all the way to beta before getting canned?
• Edit: Additive scene loading limitations should also get a mention.

At this stage my main reason for using other tools is more about keeping my own skills up to date than anything else. That said, I pick the tools for my projects on a case-by-case basis, whatever best fits the job.

 

The general state of all engines with 3D support. Good lord was 3D engine support awful back then. 3.x, compared to today, wasn't great, but compared to the alternatives at the time? Especially ones that had Mac support? Everything either cost a fortune, or had massive compatibility issues.

Everything. For 2D stuff I was still using GameMaker, I tooled around with GameBryo for a spell (dreadful engine, I can see why they ended up in the state they were in before vanishing), Ogre3D, Torque... The latter two weren't bad, but they were both very much engines in the sense of what 3D engines were like at the time: more a collection of tools and APIs than a dedicated creation system.

Honestly, the biggest con to me is the amount of assets on the asset store that don't grant source access, which is less a Unity thing and more store thing, but whatever.

 

[RuntimeInitializeOnLoad] <---- This

On the topic:
Came to Unity from the XNA Framework (~2014-ish) after making the prototype first prototype by it because of Learn section, and because XNA sucked (and still does).

Unity has a charm of not so steep learning curve, so thats that.

Decided to stay because Unity engine is probably the best from the cost / quality perspective and the ease of use.

 

Definitely helpful. I think I've even used it a bunch of times before. Still, it's called after Awake(), which is a pain.

 

You can pass the argument to the attribute to execute before scene load:
https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/RuntimeInitializeLoadType.html

Or even before splash screen load.

 

Now that is handy! Thanks.

 

Can someone tell the difference between RuntimeInitializeLoadType and RuntimeInitializeOnLoadMethod by just looking at its name? Nope Unity naming standards (Hint: The latter only triggers for the first scene)

 

I've been using Unity for around 4-5 years, before that I had never done any kind of game development.

I've dabbled in Unreal, but nothing else really. I'm a big believer in reducing 'options' when you need results. I don't have to break up my time between different tools. I pretty much got Blender, Unity, Gimp and later the Substance tools together on my computer and my focus is on making the most of them, since they are more than enough for me to achieve pretty much anything I want.

That said, I regularly consider spending more time in Unreal. I like the engine's capabilities, and I like what Epic put out in tools and features, but it would take time to become as fast and efficient as I am in Unity.

I like almost everything about Unity's straightforward, simple editor and how I can build my own workflow tools easily. It might sound like this isn't such a big thing, but when you have to work in something every day and customize your workflow, it ends up being really >75% of the value of an engine. I can make a lot of things that a game engine doesn't have, but if it's not pleasant and intuitive to use the interface, it doesn't matter what they've got.

What I don't like about Unity is the feeling that it feels like everything is squeezed into a box that is compatible with every platform out there. This can be a huge plus in some ways, but sometimes it feels like there are parts of the spectrum of quality and capability that you just can't access, at least not as easily as you should be able to.

What attracts me to Unreal over Unity is that there is just so much more really cutting edge stuff to play with, and there is nothing unavailable to me. That might not be great for getting games done (which is the main reason I've mostly kept myself away from it), but at a certain point I feel that Unreal has a lot of stuff to teach compared to Unity when you aren't a beginner. And if I want to play with them, and use them, then I will need to learn the engine, and I might end up liking it.

For now Unity is enough, but out there in the wilderness, there are great challenges and great rewards beckoning from other places

 

Congratulations! I wish you a lot of happy years ahead!

I tried Unreal a bit; it felt "heavy" and "rigid"; Unity feels light and versatile. That's about all I can say.

 

Happy Anniversary!

I've always been a mobile dev since going indie (15 years now) and Unity was the first game engine I tried. I struggled to get my head around the concept of creating things in an editor and adding components etc for a while, in fact when I first tried Unity I hated it and ditched it for a year or so.

Previous to that I was all about hand coding everything in xcode & eclipse hence how foreign Unity felt.

I finished a game for iOS and then thought I really cant be arsed to code this again for Android so I gave Unity another go because of its cross platform capabilities and a strong showing from the likes of Madfinger who released a Samurai game on iOS which looked very impressive.

The pro's for me are the cross platform side of things. The asset store has stolen many £'s from me for various quality assets too although this has its draw backs as we've seen in other recent threads.
Another big plus for me is ECS. It reminds me of how I used to code, more systems & data as opposed to OOP which if I'm honest is something I'm not great at.

The only con's for me at this stage is I'm too busy trying to finish stuff to experiment with all the cool new features that are being added so I feel like I'm getting left behind a bit.
LWRP was a bit frustrating to begin with because many assets (eg VFX) were not compatible and the docs were also a little thin on the ground for shaders but this seems to be improving on both aspects.

I have since tried unreal but I've invested too much time in Unity now to make a switch. Unity would have to drop a major bollock for me to change engines now.

@Unity That's not a challenge BTW.

 

I started with Unity on the recommendation of someone I worked with who was developing a project in it. I had looked at a number of engines at the time just to play around with as a hobbyist, but his recommendation lead me to a deep dive of research on Unity which ultimately lead to my downloading and using it. Unity was really the only "modern" game engine I worked with as a hobbyist. My other hobby attempts had been many years ago, where I was doing things like learning an API on the Commodore 64, so I was much more used to having to code everything for the engine more or less directly.

Unless you count MUDs. I worked on more than one MUD. Probably not really a "modern" game engine however...

I've never really considered moving over to Unreal. For one thing, aspects of how you use it that I've read about it did not appeal to me as much as the way Unity works. Additionally, I will never work with high end AAA graphics because my limited artistic skills simply won't allow it. True or not, the idea that Unreal is somehow better than Unity for "AAA graphics" out of the box has never mattered to me.

 

A friend of mine told me that Unity looks pretty cool. At the time i was all about C++, so C# looked like a joke to me.
I downloaded Unity to justify my arguments why Unity is so bad that i would never ever use it.
Well i will just say that it's been a few years now and i still use Unity

GameMaker, DarkBasic, DarkBasicPro, 3Impact, Leadwerks Engine

Unity is not tailored to a specific game genre. Both a curse and a blessing. You have to write a lot of stuff yourself, but i like that. The only code i fully trust is my own anyways...
The asset store is the best thing since sliced bread. If you are like me and you suck at modelling or art in general, just buy what you need and alter it to suit your needs.
For the forseeable future i will stick with Unity.

 

Well, I worked on an own engine since 2012, but with a full time job and a game engine and had too less time to work on the game which I wanted to develop. So I decided to switch to Unity for better quality, faster development, better performance and more supported platforms. It was very easy to convert my C++ project to C# and make it compatible with Unity's API because they were very similar (e.g. Component system)

First I worked with Gothic's zenGin, but only as a modder. Did this actively for like 8 years (2004 - 2012) and less active for 6 more years afterwards. 2012 I started working on an own engine. It was initially a project at the university but I kept it alive until 2017 when I decided to switch to Unity. The engine was based on open source libraries such as Ogre3d for graphics and Bullet for physics.

Pros:
- A lot of supported plattforms
- Good quality and performance easily to achieve (but still hard enough to master, still have to learn way more)

Cons:
- Crashes a lot (for some reason my project crashes too often (in editor) since around Unity 2017.4.23)
- Cool features still in Preview ^^ (DOTS, HDRP)

 

Around 1998 to 2000 I used RPG Maker 95 and legendary tales (Text based adventure engine).

Then moved onto gamemaker which was called "Mark overmars gamemaker" at the time.

Then I moved to DarkBASIC, then I moved to XNA, and then in 2007/2008 I moved to Unity 2 which was pretty momentous occasion (it was horrible compared to what it is now, almost unrecognisable in most aspects) and pretty much have stuck with it since.

Ofcourse I have dabbled with Unreal, Marmalade, Construct 2, New Gamemaker (as I call it, it will forever be mark overmars gamemaker to me), Lumberyard and Cryengine on the side, but none of those I used for more than experiements or learning.

What drew me to it was that the engine rocked, it was created by an actual team of indies who understood indies, and that still is mostly true today even with involvement of more corporate types in the company.

 

Over 8 years with Unity now.
First I was trying to build my own 3D engine, the ill-fated Nano3D, a noob mistake, then began to realize my limits so dabbled with Irrlicht then Ogre3D then briefly UDK and lastly with Unity and never looked elsewhere since.

I think the name Unity came up repeatedly in gamedev forums, I was shocked how elegant and intuitive yet powerful and capable it was.
A multiplatform general purpose blank canvas with the sky as the limit of its endless possibilities.

I think it was the level of control despite the simplicity that hooked, it's like the perfect Nano3D I had in mind, with brilliant interface, familiar human C# API and blazing fast iteration time.

I will NEVER switch to anything else even if I have to stick with 5.6

 

I was trying to write my own game engine in C# using Irrlicht.NET and the TAO framework. Even though I was mainly just writing wrappers around other libraries and implementing a simple game entity class, Writing your own game engine feels like digging yourself out of an avalanche with a spoon. Especially since various libraries I was using would become defunct here and there and then I'd have to rewrite one of wrappers to point to a new one, like switching to IrrlichtNETCP after Irrlicht.NET was abandoned by the original.

After IrrlichtNETCP was finally dropped, I just gave up. I started considering buying something like Torque or 3DGameStudio A4 or other, similar engines, but the cost of the license would have been significant for me at the time, being a student and just a hobbyist at game development. Frankly, these engines didn't seem all that good either.

There were free engines too, but back in those days, "free engine" essentially either meant that you had to build an entire application from scratch with a somewhat helpful library of classes, or it was the shell of a not-very-good game that you could mod. No easy-to-use integrated editors like we take for granted in Unity.

One day I was reading the gamedev.net forums and there was a big announcement that there was now a completely free version of the Unity Engine, which I had never heard of (or maybe I blocked it out, since previously it was not in 100$ or less catagory). It seemed too good to be true. It was hugely better than any of the paid-for game engines that I looked at, and it was completely free.

Even with the limitations of the free version (No post processing, No render textures, etc.) it was still more advanced than anything I had access to previously. Unity 4 and 5 opened even more doors in rapid succession with Mecanim animation retargeting, PBR, and all of the Pro features unlocked. Now it feels like I can do anything! ( If I could just find the time to sit down and do it )

 

Ten years! Excellent.

My first "game making software" was The Director on the Amiga in 1988, and I made an interactive drum kit like what you see on the app store. It was pretty popular in my local area but it was unmonetizable (no one would pay for a silly toy like that). I think it might be in the Fred Fish catalog. I also used it to make a touchscreen hypercard app for a Star Trek convention around 1990 but it was horribly unstable. I had to babysit that thing constantly while drunk on Romulan Ale. Good times.

My first proper engine was Unreal Editor in 1998, back when the current Epic executive lineup was just the guys at the office. Mark Rein quoted me $250,000 for commercial use (a bargain at the time) and that killed the project I was working on.

I also messed around with AMOS and GameMaker and then tried to learn C+, but quickly discovered that "real" coding is not my strength. I ended up going into video/tv/film as a 3d/vfx artist and supervisor and did that for almost 30 years.

Now I'm back at it with Unity for the last year and published my first game last month. I was tempted to jump ship to Unreal but I just feel that would be a bad idea. The docs are sparse and the whole Blueprint thing looks like a nightmare. If I keep doing game dev (haven't made any money yet), I'll most likely stick with Unity.

 

Old Amiga user as well. Went from TRS-80s to to Amiga. I was on a few Amiga (laterPC) demo teams back in the day, doing art and music, and started doing 3D with Lightwave (Amiga), which eventually landed me my first real game dev job. I just actually got an A500 again a few months ago and have it all hooked up to a proper CRT. Definitely miss those old days with AMOS and all that, and Fred Fish(!) for sure.

Totally! Similar experience here. The prices for proper engines back then definitely put a damper on doing the projects I really wanted to do.

 

Congratulations! Quite a milestone.

Well, I joined to the community in the beginning of 2015 only, but I was present way before that, just lurking from the shadows as my nick suggests.

I started to learn Unity because it became basically a no-brainer around 4.x (4.5-ish edit: 4.2, I checked).
Well, I started to make stupid little games when I was a kid and I got my C64 and I always wondered how those games was made, so started to fiddle around with BASIC (hehe, I know), then Simon's Basic (I made games became famous in our entire house...), then I started to work with Assembly. Well, this step was good for my career but it was bad for the making games stuff, because I entirely stopped to make games, I made demos instead and attended scene events.

Eventually I have started to work in software development and again, since I have stopped making games, I went to front-end development (web) and later back-end development (servers and such) and I work in this field ever since.

Eventually I started to fiddle around with Dark Basic, Game Maker, but it was only exploration, I haven't used for anything, basically. Then I tried to put together a framework on the basis of Ogre3D with other free libraries, and started to work on a game, but since I'm a lone dev, it went sooooo slow that Unity grew on me in the mean time, so I started with C# (since I have a lot of experience with different languages, like C, C++, Java, javascript, Pascal, Cobol, Fortran, various Basic iterations, various assembly languages, it wasn't hard to dig into C#) and Unity, so ever since I work in Unity.

My first couple of games was utter garbage, of course, then I helped out two friends who is working on a game for a year, and now, my own project is on-going for half a year and I predict at least two more. I know, scope, but I really want to do it, see if I'm capable, and I don't mind if it'll be a failure, I don't intend to become a full-time game developer any time soon... unless I inherit a ton of money or win on the lottery which I don't play...

So game development is a hobby of mine, and I'm happy with it for the moment.

 

It’s really funny how many of the performance tricks from Flash apply just as well to Unity. Or to other areas, for that matter.

I was very sad to see how the Flash thing played out. The Flash tool remains possibly one of the most productive media tools for 2D content I’ve seen, and open source editors like FlashDevelop let you make Flash content without even paying adobe a dime if you didn’t care about MovieClip or timelines. Heck, remember that time Unity implemented Flash as a target platform? Crazy stuff!

But in all honesty that runtime was absolutely a mess. Adobe really needed to undertake some dramatic reforms of the player if they wanted to keep Flash relevant, and Adobe was not the company to do that. I can’t blame them for preferring to focus on other avenues like the Creative Cloud.

 

I loved KSP, and saw it was using Unity.
And as Unity uses C# (which I really like because it has less 'boiler-plate' than C++), I decided to take a deeper look.

Well, last time I've created games there were no game engines.
I've created some games, mostly in basic and assembly, and very few in C/C++.
I was about 13-18 at the time, my biggest game was an adventure game where you were a cop trying to find out who was the murderer. You were in a house and could search the place and ask questions to the witnesses.
It took my neighbor and me 2 years to finish it, it was another time...

After having worked 15 years in other industries I've decided to go back to my youth dream, creating video games.
Unity is my first engine, and I'm quite happy with it.
It has a lot of problems, but any software a tenth of its size also have its share of problems.
It's just a matter of finding a way to 'fix', 'hide' or 'avoid' these problems...

I think that the biggest Unity pro is that it's easy to prototype something.
I think that the biggest Unity con is that it's easy to prototype something.
Prototyping is important, but the problem is that there are a lot of small games with prototype-code (or animation, etc.) in them, which reduce their potential.
I think it's the major reason why Unity has such a bad reputation.
I'm quite sure that for most of the 'bad' Unity games, the problem is not the tool, but how the tool had been used.

Pros:
- prototyping
- C# (faster to code than C++, while still offering good optimization possibilities)
- the possibility to code/custom the editor
- the recent heading toward performance (DOTS)

Cons:
- prototyping
- C# (if not careful with allocation, it will 'work' but it will stutter....)
- assets management (loading/unloading data dynamically in the game)
- assets (from the AssetStore) management (modifying code from an asset is a nightmare for source control, or at least I haven't yet found a 'good' way to do it)


It's hard to find pros/cons because I do not know any other game engine, but I'm pretty sure that assets could be managed more efficiently, and that's a huge part of any game engine.

I'm pretty sure I'll stick to Unity, mostly because I've spent the last 2.5 years creating a framework I use to 'fix', 'hide' or 'avoid' the tiny things I do not like in Unity, and that framework is designed to be re-used for about any other game I could make.


And anyway, I can tell you without any doubt that it's way easier to create a game with Unity that in assembly (all that code I had to write just to draw a line... and now I can display full textured-meshes in only a few lines of code).

 

Funny, I've been dabbling in Assembly so I can make some games for the Amiga. When I started out coding waaaaay back when I used BASIC, and I wanted to learn ASM (got a book and everything! haha) but was too young to wrap my head around it I guess. Enjoying playing around with it now, but yes, it's definitely different compared to Unity.

 

As a game developer, I was always checking out different tools and found it via a Mac site many, many moons ago. Tried and used many different tools prior to using it on a commercial project, mostly native code, but unreal, torque (worked at gg back in the day) and internal engines. Switched to it at LucasFilm/Disney about 5-6 years ago because out internal engine was just too slow (to update) and expensive to maintain with all the constant platform changes. Continue to use it today because It works and have built an extensive tool set around it. It's a solid tool that does the job.

 

I did some assembly way back in the day, mostly for custom hardware. Though I don't remember enjoying it.

 

I'm not sure if it's actually the Assembly language itself I'm enjoying or just simply the fact that it's cool as hell to get it actually up and running on the Amiga (also dabbling in TRS-80 CoCo Assembly). Likely the latter.

 

I find that learning to make a new thing go is oodles of fun, and then that afterwards I just want to get jobs done.

 

If you like playing with assembly, take a look at Core War:
https://crypto.stanford.edu/~blynn/play/redcode.html
In this game, 2 viruses are fighting each other in an arena of memory, they are coded in RedCode which is quite similar to a simplified assembly.

 

Cool, I'll check it out, thanks!

 

Before Unity, I had written a half-baked crappy OpenGL engine from the ground up, tried Torque, played around with other engines/libraries like libgdx and XNA, then spent a majority of my time with the C4 Engine (now called Tombstone). C4 was a C++ engine that I really loved using, but the more I slaved away at my game(s), the more I realized how far I was from completing them. I had my eyes on Unity from when it first released in 2005, but alas (lol), it was for Mac only. By 2009, I had a lot of my core tools built on C4, so I opted to not switch to Unity. I revisited Unity in 2012 and dabbled around with 4.x, and still brushed it off, because it didn't expose its source, the dev workflow was very cumbersome, and I couldn't be sure if I would ever overcome that feeling.

But I finally put my foot down. I needed to FINISH games, not write tool after tool to fill in gaps here and there. I would never be able to reach the top of Mt. Everest at the C++/C4 rate. Unity provides a gondola* at the base of the mountain, and the Asset Store makes that gondola travel even further, potentially getting me halfway up the mountain.

The Asset store was the difference maker. C4 did not have an extensive amount of supporting tools, and at the very best, gave me a good set of hiking gear.

Over time, I realized that most functionality of Unity that can be done in the Editor can also be painlessly done in script, and I have the luxury of choosing which option is best for my dev needs. This flexibility has eased my reservations about using Unity. And with C# and Visual Studio support, I was fully on board by 2013.

* Obviously a theoretical gondola, since Mt. Everest doesn't have a gondola to go to the top.

I’m with @Kiwasi and @pcg. Unity has to mess up really badly to have me stop using it. I’ve definitely had those “greener grass” thoughts about UE4 and Godot, but I’d only learn UE4 if a job required it, but I’m here to make MY games. And Godot has a long way to go to even remotely be at the level of Unity+Asset Store.

I do have those fleeting feelings of FOMO when it comes to those engines, in addition to other tech like Vulkan, Rust, but again, I’m here to make and finish MY games, and Unity still feels like the best thing out there for it.

 

I was lurking quite a while before making an account but similar period of time. I came from C++ at that point because I figured I couldn't take care of the platform explosion emerging at the same time as making actual games.

So Unity is my platform.