{"id":1397,"date":"2012-06-26T15:34:02","date_gmt":"2012-06-26T15:34:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/?p=1397"},"modified":"2012-06-26T15:34:03","modified_gmt":"2012-06-26T15:34:03","slug":"the-problem-with-unity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/2012\/06\/the-problem-with-unity\/","title":{"rendered":"The problem with Unity"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s mostly made to create universes, scenes, worlds. It\u2019s not good at creating games.<\/p>\n

Let me explain.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

For that it\u2019s pretty insane and an excellent tool.<\/p>\n

For creating games that is, designing rules and applying them it\u2019s pretty terrible. I mean all of sudden it\u2019s not drag and drop or pre-fab or anything designer-friendly, it\u2019s pure code.<\/p>\n


Help. Halp.<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that it\u2019s too complicated, it\u2019s just that it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

To me it\u2019s 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\u2019s almost like they don\u2019t need documentation, they know what they\u2019re doing. Designers trying gameplay ideas? Not so much.<\/p>\n

Designers can learn to code but it\u2019s so damn slow! It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

 
The little mechanics engines of my game prototype, thanks Playmaker!<\/em><\/p>\n

How is that visual programming is not more prevalent in game development? In this article<\/a> they aim to build entire apps but it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

I definitely miss those not-really-existing-yet tools. It\u2019s almost like we\u2019re artificially supporting two different worlds, design and code, when they should merge to some extent and create something different. Let\u2019s make it happen, people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s mostly made to create universes, scenes, worlds. It\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1397"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1397"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1398,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1397\/revisions\/1398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}