It’s mostly made to create universes, scenes, worlds. It’s not good at creating games.
Let me explain.
There are so many things made easier with Unity. You drag and drop assets, you drag and drop scripts and press play to immediately see what is going on. In 15 minutes you can create a room apply physics and move inside this world, according to the law of gravity, or not.
For that it’s pretty insane and an excellent tool.
For creating games that is, designing rules and applying them it’s pretty terrible. I mean all of sudden it’s not drag and drop or pre-fab or anything designer-friendly, it’s pure code.
Help. Halp.
It’s not that it’s too complicated, it’s just that it’s not designer-friendly. Look at how much information you get for stupid visual things that you really care about far, far into the development process. First, mechanics, core mechanics. I build a game.
All of sudden it make sense that everybody on YouTube is doing the same with this tool, creating 3D environments and eventually dropping some FPS style gameplay or third person whatever.
To me it’s almost like the Unity team should do it in reverse: make everything about gameplay with pre-made stuff (like setting a time limit, a score, simple behaviors and operators like they do for the input), a lot of documentation about how to make great controls and rules and much less about shaders et all. This stuff is complex and only experimented coders use them, it’s almost like they don’t need documentation, they know what they’re doing. Designers trying gameplay ideas? Not so much.
Designers can learn to code but it’s so damn slow! It’s so tedious, I think we know enough about games to pre-fab a lot more or make it more granular and fluid yet friendly when it comes to create mechanics. Game Maker is closer and yet lack other stuff.
The little mechanics engines of my game prototype, thanks Playmaker!
How is that visual programming is not more prevalent in game development? In this article they aim to build entire apps but it’s not a good way to look at it, parts of game development could definitely profit visual programming simply because there are more about design than code parts.
I definitely miss those not-really-existing-yet tools. It’s almost like we’re artificially supporting two different worlds, design and code, when they should merge to some extent and create something different. Let’s make it happen, people.