A few months ago, I was introduced by a friend of mine from Norway about another game Engine called
Unity. Unity is originally a 3D engine made for Macintosh platforms. As of the time it was introduced to me, it's still purely for the Mac and iPhone with a promise of releasing a PC version in the future.
All I can do at that time is to browse through its website and see if it is well documented and supported. I discovered that it's a sleek nice engine with powerful 3D rendering. And the thing that surprised me most is its capability of publishing the game on a web-browser! All you need to do is download and install their Unity plug-in and the next time you visit that site page, you will be able to play the game in full 3D! The documentation is indeed well written or should I say completely suffice to what reference you might be needing in using the engine. The scripting language used is JavaScript, C#, and Boo -- languages that are more established rather than a lackluster proprietary language that some engines enforce.
I am just too excited about that engine that I thought I should just try it and prepare for projects for that engine. But how? I don't have a Mac! Well, my only option is to turn my MSI Wind Netbook to a Hackintosh. Ridding out of all the details on how I did it, I was able to prepare a Hackintosh thanks to
MSIWind.net. I quickly downloaded the Unity Mac demo and tried it out.
Unity is amazing! It's one minimalist-looking editor packed with fully organized features and power you need on a game engine. It's a world editor, script editor, and an asset manager/repository in one! A neat and soothing feature of Unity is the one-click publishing feature. With just a click, you can build and run (deploy) your current project to any supported platform. Also on editing and creation of a scene, you can live edit the gameobjects on run-time. This certainly speeds up debugging and testing.
A few weeks later, GDC came. On that time, Unity released its Windows version! This version is no different from the Mac in terms of look and feel. It's a good time for them to launch the Windows version because I don't have the money to buy a Mac yet. But, I do have the money to pay for an Indie license, which I acquired. Insane? No. For me, it's good investment. Despite to what most people perceive of me, I am a games programmer first, and an engine programmer second. I want to make games fast! Aside from the cool things I mentioned about Unity before, a personal reason I like about Unity is that it's a model for my end goal of my engine. Unity did what I thought is a good engine, specifically, making objects act like a modified
composite pattern, wherein the game object act as a container of components which define the behavior that game object has.
So, if you want to make games quick with less the deep intricacies of programming them but still yield a customized original game from "scratch", try
Unity!
