Why did You choose Unity?

Hello All,

As a developer, an artist, a designer, a programmer, a hobbyist, a small indie team, small studio, or even a AAA Studio...as the title asks...

Why did You choose Unity?

I'm looking to spark a good discussion.

 

Personally, C# and accessibility. I came from an XNA background (dabbling) but I've been a .NET developer for a lot of years. For me Unity was very accessible when I got into it. There was a free version available, a great community, C# support and while game development is definitely no cakewalk, a pretty intuitive and easy to pick up the basics engine and editor. Probably the #1 seller for me though has been the community.

 

1. Excellent support for a vast range of platforms (especially mobile) with little to no consideration or effort to deploy to different platforms. It's almost a write once, run everywhere platform.
   
   
2. Cost model that allows us to start developing and release a game and to build our business and profit before we need to hand out $1000's for the software.
   
   
3. Large community.

 

And don't forget, no royalties.

 

Well, I like the idea of having hundreds of developers helping make my game with me, even though it's in a rather indirect way.

Granted, many of them are working on things that aren't directly relevant to my game. But quite a few are! And for quite a good price.

 

The theme so far seems to be... The Community, and athough I'm just learning, I have to agree.

Reading through the threads here alone there is a wealth of information, and there appears to be a great number of helpful people.

The tutorials that are available are really well done.

While I haven't used anything yet from the Asset Store, I've been familiarizing myself with the products there, it seems every time I'm window shopping there I see something that makes me think "If I was making that type of game, I would want to use something like that... what else does this person produce?"

C# yes C#, I'm just a learning programmer, but I've heard a lot of good things about C#. I will take the experienced programmers word on it.

And the Cost? I agree the cost model is fantastic, with the no royalties even better.

 

I had never heard of Unity until around November 2013. XNA development stopped so I looked for the next thing. I spent a lot of time researching looking for something that I thought would be around for many years. Because in IT there are always new things coming out so I am constantly learning BUT I get tired of having to do the same for my personal time with game dev. Getting into a game API then it dies. Then another. And another. And another. So many times now.

Anyway, I found a link to Unity on some website some place. Checked it out and was surprised how it could be around for so long and yet I never heard of it. I think maybe it was just MAC at one time maybe because it is weird I never came across it before. Anyway, longevity and the fact that it supported so many platforms.

 

I chose Unity because Unity developers get all the girls.

 

@GarBenjamin this is very similar to myself, except I do not have an IT background. I just discovered Unity only near the end of April this year 2015. And apparently it's been around since 2005!

I found out about it because I've been learning web development, which led to wanting to learn programming, and then somehow I found myself here.

And XNA, I had never heard of that until I was researching alternatives to Unity.

 

That sounds legit

 

There wasn't really anything else for the Mac (or at least nothing all that great) back in 2006. I'd heard of Unity before, but for some reason I thought it was a modeling app like Blender. Once I actually realized what it was and tried it, I was like, "Whoa. Dude." Also there was no free license back then; you had the choice of $250 for the Indie license or $1500 for Pro. There was a 15-day trial though. The platforms were OS X, webplayer, and dashboard widgets. Also Windows, but you had to buy Pro for that. You could actually read all the posts on the forums at that time, too. Once I learned Unity, I'd answer questions about "how do you access variables on other scripts" because back then it wasn't trivially easy to find that out with a simple search (of which there are about 10 million answers to now, probably 25% of those being mine).

--Eric

 

Unless the girls are models you make then yes.

Doesn`t seem to work for the real ones, sadly.


But for the topic:

• Portability
• Extremely easy to use, it`s like now being able to make games with almost no knowledge
• C# language support, great use in Game Industry and in pogramming general (Unlike GameMaker engine with its GML - something horrible)
• A lot of functionality for indie developers. Don`t have to get into complex CryEngine for normal games we make.
• Intuitive UI, (though horrible light skin), but very easy to make game prototypes and test them
• Great support, community

 

When I started with Unity it was the only decent engine around that had a free version. I wanted an engine that had a scene editor, and let me get deep into the coding, Unity was the only thing I could afford that fit. This wasn't that long ago, only a little over a year ago.

Sure, now there are freeish alternatives like Unreal. But that's a whole new work process to learn. And looking over the documentation there it doesn't seem worth the switch. I mean, who wants to go back to C++ after learning C#?

So these days there is a bit of a sunk cost component in the decision. But I still think Unity is the best all round engine out there at the moment.

Oh, and the community. I have a bit of a competitive streak. Got addicted to karma chasing on answers. Then like chasing here. Now it's view chasing on YouTube. One of these days I'll implement a decent analytic system my game and start chasing plays.

Oh, and as to the girls, I already caught a good looking one who plays halo before I discovered Unity. So far my addiction to Unity hasn't broken our relationship. But if I ever do disappear from the forums for a few months, that will be why. No game is worth losing the girls.

 

When I started with Unity (2.x .... may have been Unity 2.1) it was Mac only and had no Free version. The thing that became the first free version was unity Indie and cost roughly 300,-€. I did not have a Mac of my own when I first used it because I partly used it for my thesis at University and was using university hard- and software by then. When that was over I bought an iMac and Unity Indie because it was the first engine that provided most of the features of the competitors but was actually user friendly.

The community was super small back then but everybody was super helpful and friendly.

And so over the years I just kept using it. I still love the software and I know that Unity did most of the things we take for granted now (free engine, features accessible to non programmers, easy and flexible scripting without being a one trick pony like some game creators...).

There is more competition now which is a good thing for the users. And I like having more alternatives. But in the end I sort of grew up with Unity over the last few years despite being an artist and in the first few years not having any scripting capabilities whatsoever.

 

In part because of what Eric said, as a Mac user, it was one of the few options. Mainly because I liked the flow. I am always trying out tools and when I got around to trying Unity, I just liked it. A big reason professionally, is the multi-platform aspect. I have ported several games to other platforms, I really dislike it. It seems silly to re-build the same game on other platforms. With Unity I can just focus on building the game and less about deployment.

 

Lots of reasons:

• AAA tools
• Easy to learn
• Highly flexible
• Asset store
• Extensions
• No royalties
• Tons of platforms to choose from
• Easy porting
• Friendly community
• And the last but not least...

 

I became aware of its existence after googling "I have an idea for a game"
Before I got too heavily into it, I researched the differences between Unity, UE/UDK, and CryEngine.

Unity seemed an easy choice, it's free with no royalties, there is extensive documentation and an abundance of tutorials. Lurking the forums revealed an outstanding community, and that clinched it for me.

Now that I'm close-ish to finishing my first game, I feel like it was an excellent decision. Just wish I had more discipline and spent more time making games and less time playing them..

 

I wanted to make a real game, and I am trying it even now. I started with Unity 3.5. It was not as complex as Blender, nor a total drag and drop like Sploder!, which is maybe why. I wanted a challenge. Now, I have been using unity for 2 years. Also, It was free

 

I tried a few other engines, Hero, Multiverse, etc, but they all sucked in their own way. People were talking about Unity or Cry, and looking at Unity forums; UMA was an idea in the WIP thread. So I picked Unity, and I'm glad I did.

 

* Unity is the only engine where I've felt enabled to work as I wish rather than forced to work in a certain way.
* The APIs are very easy to understand and are not bloated.
* C#.
* Great performance, even on mobile devices.
* The pricing model suits me well.
* Most popular engine and biggest community - lots of support and documentation.
* Thriving asset store.

 

Because it's hand down the best game engine out there for small teams or loan developers. If you're a company and have the resources to produce a real AAA game and are aiming it at PC and wish it to look realistic and rival EA or Ubisoft and can cut a net rather than a gross deal with Epic, then no question, use UE4. Otherwise unity has no competitor.

The asset store promotes creativity as well. If I want to prototype gameplay in order to test how something plays or to use it as a start position to extrapolate ideas from it, then having access to numerous cheap projects in the asset store promotes creativity, with Unity and a bought project I am already beyond the basic testing stage and into the 'how can I improve, modify, tweak these controls, tehse ideas to create something new.

Prime example of this was a recent 7 day FPS challenge that someone using torque 3D had entered. What he did was impressive for Torque 3D as anyone that knows that engine could see, but at the end of the contest he had finished where all the others using Unity had started from, so for those not in the know about Torque 3D what he did was far less than impressive, meanwhile the Unity guys had plugged in various scripts and already started to showcase some real creativity. That's a very big deal to have available all these projects to allow one to explore ideas without wasting time doing real basic gameplay. For that alone Unity is the best engine available.

 

I chose unity because it had everything i wanted, it was free, it had c# and it was pretty easy to use.

 

It was the best free option when I checked it out some years ago. Right now what I like most about it is the easy access to mesh data for procedural content.

I'll probably end up with whoever better supports the sixense controllers when they ship in 2025. Unity is in the lead with official support for the hydra controller.

 

My primary reason for choosing Unity was simply that I was tired of working with C++ and my own engines. I tried UDK initially but it simply wasn't enjoyable to work with and was fairly limited on platform choices.

A couple weeks after starting to learn UDK I heard Unity's Indie option went free and decided to evaluate it. I was able to get further along in Unity 3.x in a couple days than I did with UDK after a couple weeks.

 

The active content in Unity Assets Store.
Yeah, the plugins, the "ready for Unity" assets.
Mecanim and much more.

I feel that Unity editor is more intuitive now compare to its rival game engine.

 

First engine I ever tried was CryEngine, I just played with it, created a few things, but never anything serious. Than I had an idea for a game and started trully looking for a viable solution. Unity did not have the best graphic tools, the most tools, but I could write for it in C# and JS and this was the first step why I chose it. I think I made the right decision because I haven't found anything yet I would trully miss. Yes I ran into few limits I hope will be improved soon (like generating navmesh during runtime).

 

C#

 

I started with the Unreal 4 Engine but on the programming side the Unreal Framework was a pita to work with and had barely any documentation and i am not a big fan of c++. The community could only help out with basic problems and mostly was concentrating on Blueprints, which i also am not too fond of. Mobile Support was atrocious (don't know how it is now) so i switched to Unity after giving it a chance for two months.

I work on my own, i have to do everything as far as developing a game goes and Unity is so much better/easier than UE4 in that regard, it is just pure joy to work with (well, at least for most of the time).
You can find so much help when you are stuck, that most of the time i figure my problems out by reading the answers to other peoples questions that were related to what i wanted to achieve.

UE4 looked better visually out of the gate without having to adjust any settings but it also had a certain look, changing it wasn't easy and would usually make the engine look worse hence why most big devs don't do it and you can immediately tell when a game was made with UE.

My post is UE4 vs Unity but starting such a discussion was/is not my intention, it's just that i didn't choose Unity at first and the only reason i switched to Unity are the points above and some smaller things i didn't mention, UE4 does a lot of things right or even better than unity (like giving us the full source), it's just wasn't for me

 

C#
Robust asset pipeline (importers)
Awesome component-based architecture
Super flexible editor
Asset store
Very active community
Gobs of tutorials, books, videos, etc
Support for basically every imaginable platform

 

i honestly don't even remember how i came across unity in the first place. but i fell in love with it immediately. it was back in the 3.x days too. i just thought it was so amazing, and it the possibilites were endless, and all for free too which i love. maybe i saw it on reddit or something, not sure.

 

My first approach was motivated by:
1) Multiplatform support, including web (well, now WebGL) support
2) No royalties.
3) Affordable entry fee.

Now, in addition to those, I really appreciate:
4) C# support.
5) Workflow in general
6) Ability to inspire others with jaw-dropping visuals.

 

I found Unity back around 3.2, I imagine. I was much younger and was googling stuff like "free game maker no code". It was actually the "JavaScript" support that got me interested, I thought my weak knowledge of HTML and JS could get me by . Luckily, I stuck with it. It hooked me in immediately. It was the only game engine that "just worked" and was so damn intuitive. You write the scripts, slap 'em on the objects you want, and hit play. Game Dev doesn't get much better than that.

 

For me the free version was a big motivator. I was working on my own game framework for HAXE when Unity got it's free release. A few months after that, I made the switch.

But a big point that has kept me on Unity, is the flexibility of the editor. As it turns out, I really, really enjoy making tools. And Unity's scripting interface makes it possible for me to construct all sorts of tools to make my game development experience easier and faster. Expanding on the engine with custom functionality is both easy and enjoyable.

 

I don't even remember how I found Unity but it must of been during some search for coding books for the iPhone. At that time in 2009 it was an easy choice though when your background already had you taking computer graphics classes and working as a programmer in UNIX environments.

Now I've stayed with Unity because it comes closest to making game and app creation the easiest for everyone.

 

Honestly? Because 3-4 years ago, when I barely knew how to write a single line of code, I wanted to make a 3D game. I started with UDK, but I had no idea how to use it. Then I hopped to the next engine I knew of, CryEngine. That blue-screened my computer. Unity was the next thing on the list, and I was actually able to make stuff work. Now I stick with it mainly because of the ease of development. It's so ridiculously easy to add new features or import a new model.

 

I have tried Game Maker, Unreal, looked at CryEngine and some other stuff, but Unity seemed like the easiest to pick up and do stuff with. I actually had a much harder time executing stuff in Game Maker than Unity, but that might also be the age difference I tried them at.

Why I'm sticking with Unity? Lovely community, loads of tutorials, great editor and lots of possibilities.

 

When I started looking for a game engine, what I really needed was something that allowed me to easily develop for the Razer Hydra. I narrowed it down to Blender, UDK and Unity. With Blender, I either had to make the game difficulty to install or release it under the GPL. Neither was acceptable. If I remember correctly UDK wanted a 30% royalty and a ~$2500 license per year to use games internally in my business. That wasn't going to work. Then I found out about the Rift which ruled out Blender. I needed Unity Pro to work with the rift but it was still much cheaper than UDK so I ended up getting a Unity subscription.

UE4 was enticing especially when they made it free with just the 10% royalty but then Unity included all the features that I needed with the free version and no royalties. I love how easy it is to use the Rift and Hydra prefabs without having too much programming experience.

 

Wow! So much inspiration, and a great mix of why people choose Unity!

Thanks so much for all the responses to my question here! This really speaks volumes for the community here, and I'm glad I joined it.

 

Because I didn't know any better. I still don't. I had never coded or modeled before so I guess I'm one of the fortunate ones to have Blender and Unity readily available when that wild hair flew up my arse.

One thing became awfully apparent when I touched UE4 and it's something that takes delicate years to build. I was going to attempt to start a project in it and hit a brick wall when I encountered my first question; I don't remember what the question was but lets just boil it down to something as simple as moving an object in scene. Instead of asking on the forums I jumped into the documentation - what a ****ing nightmare! Not sure if it was my inability to make sense of their documentation structure, or comprehend the content of the documentation, or a combination of both. Either way I had no idea, after reading through their intros and documentation, where to find what I was looking for. Every question I've had so far, when dealing with Unity, has been answered by numerous links in a google search or by reading through the documentation and the examples it provides. That is why I can't see myself using anything else but, then again, I'm no professional developer - I need that resource.

TLDR: Unity's community has me spoiled

 

@coldjalapeno every now and then I consider trying to use UE4 so I can say I use both, but I run into similar trouble. Even with C++ experience, I still need to read through the documentation to get anything useful done because of all of the built in UE methods for everything. I spend 1-3 days trying to make something, run into a wall with the documentation & slow community, then give up.

I'm sure it's worth the time investment, looking at projects like planets cubed, but 3 days should be enough for something simple!

 

Similar experience here. I've had wildly simple questions in UE4 that just go perpetually unanswered.
The community really is a huge boon that shouldn't be underestimated. Plus the massive asset store allows you to avoid doing a lot of complex stuff yourself.

 

Totally agree there. From my first downloading Unity to having a playable web player hosted on my blog was less then 24 hours. Sure it wasn't a great game. But it was a game. Its only gotten easier since then.

 

A 6 day effort gave me a multiplayer shooter in UE4. But that was a matter of simply marking the right objects to be tracked over a network and change the nerf gun in the demo to use raytracing. Blueprints and the like are a delight to work with... when you know what you're looking for.

But so far the score is:

Unity - several complete games, many more complete projects, even more ideas conceptualized and tested
UE4 - 2 and a half tutorials completed

haha

 

Yes, that about sums up my experience with visual scripting in general.

 

I have UE4 installed on my computer. I even open it from time to time. First time I couldn't even find the engine launcher button, it kept wanting me to play games or mod existing games. Future attempts to launch it have ended in similar frustrations, I did get into the editor once. Exploring the documentation has been about the same.

 

Basically you open the Launcher, click the Library option, click "Add Versions", click the version number for a drop down list of versions, and click "Install". Once this is done the Launch button should become usable in the upper-left corner.

 

My point exactly. In Unity I just open Unity and click "New Project".

You can look at the process and say "It's not that hard", and objectively it isn't. But neither is it intuitive. The engine immediately threw at me a bunch of junk I really didn't care about, with no clear direction on where I should go or what I could do. Sure, eventually I figured out what I wanted. But if my experience getting the software open was indicative of the experience of developing in it then I'll pass.

At just about every stage I was thinking "This would be so much easier back in Unity". And so that's where I went.

I'm comfortable here in this engine. So until something dramatically better comes out, or Unity messes up big time, this is where I will stay.

 

The general vibe that I get from the Unity Community so far is this... If you have put forth an honest effort to learn yourself first, then the community will likely help or point you in the right direction. Provided that you've made a real honest attempt first, and that you have a realistic goal for your level of developing.
Again this is just how I see Unity from observing the forums.

 

The answer is the BlueprintPure UE tag(?) so you can just make your own. I completed that 1 page tutorial. I made a blueprint node that could add 2 floats together. It was glorious.

That's been the end of every UE4 venture thus far for me too.

They did mention stricter DRM in the future. When exposed to DRM I fair worse than vampires with garlic juice for blood. I'd sooner give up the internet than let my dear community members witness such a horrible thing.