What I find wrong with Unity Developers

Given they have become the most ubiquitous game engine, are the vastly dominate engine of choice in several markets, have several millions of users and basically brought game development to masses and are massively successful company.... its pretty clear thier idea not only materialized, but exceeded expectations.

 

Yes, the idea for Unity as a company indeed materialised.

Not sure about Unity as an engine.

(I really dislike the "it's popular so it must be good" argument and that is the main reason for me posting this)

 

Usually this argument is brought up when discussing companies like Intel and Microsoft who have known histories of forcing their hardware and software onto people through OEMs when there have been good alternatives available.

For Unity though this statement doesn't really work. They aren't conspiring with other companies to restrict you.

 

I hear it more in art, (which is also what I had in mind). "Transformers is popular, so it must be good".

EDIT:

Just to clarify. I don't really agree with a lot of what daxiongmao said. I also quite like Unity, although I feel it has a number of problems (which is outside the scope of this thread). I just lose my mind with that argument. I think I will stay away from this thread.

 

It's not about popularity, it's about its usefulness and effectiveness as a tool. It became popular and successful because it excelled as an effective tool. There weren't rich and solid cross platform tools prior to it. Everything was low level / native and required full ports. Commercial tools were specific and expensive. And there was virtually nothing for broader, amateur/hobby level. The "indie/hobby" development scene before unity gained traction was tiny and populated primarily by folks with existing skills. There were some exceptions but they were largely toys or platform specific. It became popular because there wasn't decent alternatives. And professionally it took a long time for adoption, because it wasn't mature as tool or company. But it eventually did become so, and was able to replace internal engines or porting.

 

Honestly OP if you think Unity devs are doing so many things wrong, and I don't mean to be patronizing (this is in good fun) but you could just start your own game engine company and make it restricted only to those who know what they're doing. Like yourself.

 

It's not patronizing at all, it is accurate.
There are tons of tools and ways to make games. If Unity doesn't fit your needs, there are many, many options. Writing your own engine, or just writing native, or one of a variety of other engines. Or using Unity and building the tools/writing the code to get it done. The only limits to creating a game are your skills, persistence and the resources and time within your scope. And even that can be offset through collaboration. Things like "uneducated community" (not true), and your own lack of knowledge are completely unrelated to Unity or any other tool. Clearly there are thousands of great games made by small/individual developers, using Unity and many other tools. It obviously can be done, so if one can't, the problem is entirely on that developer.

I am often amazed about the level of "complaints" and "limitations" that the unskilled level at any tool in the realm of game development. Certainly there is plenty of room for development on any of the major tools, but that is just life. Make suggestions, if it is a actually a blocker for you, you are bound to fail. Solve your problem, even that means re-scoping to fit your skill set. There are people who look for excuses, and there those who look for solutions (you know... the ones who actually make games). Consider around a decade ago, the biggest and growing market was online (web) games. You used flash. Period. They controlled the tool, the engine and the platform. There literally wasn't any other options to reach your market. With the growth of mobile and webgl, that has changed, and developers aren't locked to a vendor. It was easy to complain about adobe then, because you couldn't go elsewhere. (but at least the entire development market was in the same boat.

Its a pretty damn good time be in game development, individual to large studio developer. Constant improvement and better tools, and easy access to the primary markets. The main separator is ability and creativity, the tools have almost become trivial.

 

I just saw code example on page two. haha. The guy talks about Poor Unity developers. He is clearly a victim to the Dunning–Kruger effect

 

Just my opinion here but in today's market I believe it's prudent to have a backup engine, there's a small(ish) time investment for what's initially a redundancy measure. There's many benefits, you'd be suprised what you can learn from a AAA engine; some of the workflow initiatives are extremely clever and makes a lot of sense.

Plus if your project ultimatley goes awry in engine one then it's not a major issue, also engines like Lumberyard come with a crazy amount of tools out the box, so you might not even have to build your pipelines from the ground up again.. Obviously depends on what you're working on, second engine could be xenko / godot / UE etc.

It's always a matter of context, engine X is great for X and not so much for Y..

As @zombiegorilla says, it's a great time to be a dev (excluding the whole market bit)..

 

Have not read it all but wanted to make a few points to the OP.

Find Object Calls
A agree that we should be seeing less GameObject.Find in content made for beginners since it forms bad habits and the faster they learn to use [SerializeField] and setting references in the inspector the better.

Coroutines
No clue why you are criticizing Coroutines they are simply a tool in the tool belt, and like any other tool it takes a certain level of experience to know when, where, why and how to use them.

The Asset Con
If a company or person makes asset of course they want to show it off in a way that people feel they need to buy it. Also even in a professorial context, say there is a system for doing X but it costs say $100 to buy. Well i could write my own system to do the same thing but based on my salary that would be a massive waste of company resources and money when it can just be bought.

Developers
About things being cobbled together even AAA studios have to do this at times, and even good developers write bad code when the time or money to do it properly just isn't there, or because the scope changed and your old code no longer does what is needed but you have to make it work anyways with the time you got.

Community
The community is pretty typical, just like the game engine it is populated by people of all skill levels, but just like most communities it population is also much larger on the beginner side and hobbyist side. This is simply a function of if you are new you likely need more support, and if your a hobbyists you have more time, and don't have co-workers that can help you.

The Community still contains a small but hard working set of people who use the engine professorially or have spent lots of time learning the engine and are generous with the knowledge they have and what little time they have. But yes they can get drowned out by the much larger set of beginners in the community or the ones that don't know what they don't know yet.