With Unity today do you think -

Do you think with the tools Unity offers today, that games lets say Pilot Wings for the SNES could have been built in a single day or two with Unity?

Reason I mention Pilot Wings (for one it was fun). But it's actually quite a simple game honestly.

 

No, probably not.
If you go for more than an 8 hour work day, the core gameplay might work. Since you don't have to design it yourself, but just copy it.
if you go for visual "quality" as you can call it for SNES these days, no, still longer. (if you create your own graphics and don't steal them somewhere)
But it won't be anywhere close as performant enough to run on the same hardware, I don't think i have to mention that as it should be obvious.
Not to mention bug fixing or general polishing to make the game worth something.

 

@Fuzzy - I just don't see how it could take very long.
I mean if you really think about it. The Airplane missions - have a Rigidbody.AddReleativeForce(Vector3.forward * speed); and there's the forward movement, then if key W is pressed make the speed go a bit faster. A and D just do a turning rotation.

Then the maps would be very very basic shapes as it was for N64 and SNES for Pilot Wings.
SNES I believe was completely flat with a Cube for the buildings.

The runways would be basic plains with textures of the runway on it.

Just seems like it wouldn't take very long.
I may actually end up making a video of quickly making my own Pilot Wings tutorial kinda thing lol....
Would be a nice little tutorial series I suppose

 

You could put together something in a couple days, sure, but if you play the SNES version and your 2 day prototype. There will be a world of difference in which is more fun.

It'd take time to match the actual result.

@Fuzzy is insightful, the biggest advantage you have is that you'd be cloning something not having to figure out the mechanics.

 

It's easy to look at an existing thing that was created long ago and imagine how it could be done much more efficiently and quickly using modern tools. Take the pyramids, for example. It's claimed they took 20 years to be built through massive slave labor. Using non-Union construction crews with modern heavy equipment, they could be built in a few months.

The biggest difference between then and now though, (and I think, our biggest actual advantage) is that we have the final product to copy. While I think someone could replicate Pilot Wings well enough in a few days, they're copying from a very specific design that is already proven to work. Nintendo EAD didn't have that when they created the original. So a good portion of the time was likely spent planning, trying, iterating, and improving. They had to find what didn't work, or what didn't look good, or what wasn't fun. We have the advantage of their experience (as well as the collective experience of the industry since that point) to give us a head start.

Additionally, it's one thing to build Pilot Wings for modern gaming platforms using modern PCs. It's quite another to do it for the hugely restrictive platforms of the time, and using computers that had less processing power than my fridge.

So with that said, could Pilot Wings have been built in a day or two if they had Unity? No. Unless they also had the hardware to run it on, the platform power to deploy it to, and the experience and matured industry we currently enjoy.

 

I didn't mean back then could they have created it faster with Unity. I just meant in general if someone sat down, (today). And literally just replicate it (think of a GameJam).

But I feel like getting back into making tutorials lol, so that's going to be my project now lol.

 

Oh. You threw me off with your verb tense. "could have been" vs "could be".

 

This?

I'm fairly sure it won't be possible. You'll waste at least a week on art assets.
I think a month or two will be a reasonable timeframe for this kind of game.

However, if you, say, have a hundred people to work on it...

 

@neginfinity - well I didn't mean exact to a T lol.
Pretty much just a working game like it lol. In the matter of a few minutes I already built an Island and runway lol.
Again - not exactly the same just in my own little way lol....

Pretty much making a tutorial series on how to at least get a game like this working.
It's just a fun little project I just decided to do lol.

But again - not nowhere near the same graphical quality.
Like the character will look boxy like Minecraft, the airplane, etc the same way.

It's just gonna be something for fun, whether people wanna make games like it I have no idea.
But hey nothing wrong with making tutorials I suppose lol.

(I wasn't gonna make one) so that's not what this was originally about, but figured I may as well make one sense I know how lol.

And dang they built a home in one day hahaahah..

 

2-3 weeks i guess.. lols if u stay dedicated ( i mean, unlike me ><)

 

With the amount of Out-Loud-Laughing you did in that post, I picture you browsing the forums in full Joker getup, maniacally mashing away at the keyboard while dancing about the room over Batman's unconscious body.

 

Even the simpliest of games can take a lot of effort.

Flappy Bird is a 2-3 day development, and is significantly more basic than the game you mention

 

I doubt you could duplicate it within 2 days even using an ultra simple presentation style. Definitely it would save a good amount of time compared to if you try to make everything look as "gee whiz!" as possible. Huge time savings. Still there is more to it than just what you are looking at. The "missions", playfields, scoring, control, different "vehicles" and so on all add up to a fair amount of infrastructure you need to program.

I think it could be done within 10 days or so of dedicated effort though. Again with ultra simple focus on graphics. Otherwise heck you could (and many people do) spend 3 months or more just on the graphics and still need to make the actual game.

EDIT: I also think it would be cool if you make a start to finish tutorial on it. I know you spend about 16 hours per day on modeling and developing in Unity. You have a good amount of experience as a result. Just track all of your time and include in each video how much time it takes. Or heck just record all of your dev sessions.

 

No way. That's the big mistake people people who haven't finished games assume. There is much more to it than the tech demo of falling through some hoops.

If you mean a prototype? sure. Full game? 3-6 months (still really quick).

 

I think less than 3-6 months, but still @hippocoder is dead right. Just glancing through a video for 30 seconds, there is a lot more going on here than a few velocity changes. The level design, the intro screens, all the little details. That stuff will add up to quite a lot of time.

 

Sounds, menus, polish, options, intro, ending sequences, story, progression, gameplay balance, textures, etc etc etc. Sure it's not 6 months?

...And a month or two worth of planning, unless they're all mind readers. Really, nobody thinks this stuff through at all.

 

Funny, the first thing I thought about was the sound - I think people underestimate this the most. I think it could be done in less than 3, but I am a nutjob. Again, if you're straight up cloning this - you don't need to worry about story, progression or balance, just copy it.

Most likely what would happen is that the parties involved would end up cranking up the presentation to the point where they'd be looking at a year+ because "so much new stuff is possible!".

 

I wasn't really meaning the sounds, story, etc. Was mainly just talking about the main mechanics to it..
I really have a problem explaining things hahaahah.

I apologize about the confusion.

 

basic mechanics rarely take longer than a few days to nut out.

 

Well you mentioned using cubes and planes ao I figured you meant all around minimalism on the presentation including blips, beeps and hisses for sounds and so forth. No polish just getting it done period.

Are you doing it?

 

Yeah I was talking about being minimal about it, I wasn't meaning I'd replicate every single pixel they did lol.
Just to give users a sense of hey this is how I can get started in this kind of game.
(at least with a tutorial series) - I do have one episode done. But gonna work on the next episode tomorrow or something.

But in general I'm sure they could have quickly worked better if stuff we have now days was available back then (including more powerful machines).

 

It ain't happening. The art in that game is fairly polished (despite being low-res), and you'll sink a LOT of time on that. Did you notice that avatars are animated and have facial expression?

You can MAYBE make a rough prototype in a week, you'll waste most of the time making art assets, and then you'll have to polish it for weeks or (most likely) months.

Main mechanics 2..7 days if you're good at programming, but you'll probably waste another week making placeholder assets for that. Flight model might end up being trickier than it looks, and physx doesn't exactly simulate wind or flying, so you can hit a hidden "landmine"(show-stopper problem) and waste waaay waste more time than you originally expected.

 

Check out what people and small groups can make during game JAM's.

With Unity you can make a similar game/prototype to Pilot Wings, in a very short space of time.

Unity only provides a 10km 10,000 unit space where it's 32 bit floating point precision system is accurate, so you would be limited to this for a quick build.

You can build a system to work around this in essence the player stays at the origin and the world moves and streams in but you will need to write your own code to handle that.

What will take more time is adding levels, aircraft, progression and meta game mechanics that keep people playing.

Then there is ensuring that the games controls and physics handle really well, from novice to pro users and across input systems (touch, keyboard/mouse, controller, joystick).

Then there is polishing and Juicing it up to 11 (there are some good lectures/tutorials on this).

 

I wonder how pilotwings coped with snes 16 bits and 3mhz processor.

 

Next paragraph...

Note: how the levels tend to have small islands of detail, in a large blank space containing only land or sea and sky.

In Unity you could achieve the same with a Skybox and Game Objects for islands.

 

I honestly doubt pilotwings moved anything at all.

 

And an awful long time to polish. The simpler the mechanics, the easier it is to spot a blemish.

 

Wait a minute didn't SNES have a Mode 7 hardware accelerated rotation of a bitmap?

 

So it's a valid plan if they are mind readers? Do you know where I could hire some? It sounds like working with a team of them would save lots of time!

 

Speaking of SNES, I'd still much rather have a Cartridge than a Disc or Downloadable Content any day.
Hell even a Disc inside of a cartridge like cover would work. I just miss the old boxes and huge instruction booklets, and sticking it inside the console..... Man as soon as I get the money I'm gonna buy another SNES lol....

 

Wouldn't they already know? Perhaps that is why they are avoiding you.

 

I guess they don't share my vision of a future dominated with VR powered personalized paradises

Or maybe they have sensitive mind-hearing and the volume of activity in my head wards them off

 

My pick is its not so much the volume, more the sheer number of voices.

 

How does he know they're all his voices?

 

Yea I meant volume as in quantity rather than decibels

Because all of the threads are accounted for Gotta love java as a model for reprogramming the human mind.

 

I had the core mechanics of my game done and playable in two days
Two years down and I'd say im about half done with the finished product

Yeah, Game and Prototype are pretty different things