Tower Defense Indie Game Dev Blog #6: Moving to Unity Engine

Published June 10, 2018
Advertisement

Reasons to use Unity

*Sigh*... After over a month of programming the game in Java /Kotlin and OpenGL I finally decided to move to Unity game engine. This is very frustrating, but it seems I have no other choice right now but to rewrite the whole game. There are few reasons as to why I chose Unity instead of hard-coding everything in Java/Kotlin. First of all, the development pace is faster. It took me whole day to implement shadows in OpenGL, but it takes only few clicks to do in Unity. Other major reason is that if I ever decided to team up with someone to make a game, it would be much easier to find people who can use Unity to make games than people who use Kotlin and OpenGL (Ort least I think so).

 

game_view

Progress

After only two days of learning Unity I was able to:

  1. Implement turret placement logic
  2. Implement pathfinding
  3. Make the enemies follow the generated paths

unity_editor

Conquering my ego

I always had a problem with my ego which resulted in me always doing the hard approach to all the problems. I always wanted to solve problems by myself and reinvent the wheel. I never considered using a game engine, because I thought it wasn't "real" programming. I'm stupid like that sometimes. But as the time passed, I matured and now I realized that a tool is a tool, and you have to pick the right one to solve your problem. In my case this tool is Unity, and I hope it won't let me down in the future.

unity_editor_top_view

 

That is all for today, thanks for reading!

Twitter: https://twitter.com/extrabitgames
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/extrabitgames
Website: http://extrabitgames.com

4 likes 6 comments

Comments

lawnjelly

Good luck with the unity version! It seems good for small games like this.

Quote

I never considered using a game engine, because I thought it wasn't "real" programming.

Oh, it isn't. Unity is for babies, but it does have its place. :)

June 10, 2018 07:28 PM
DexterZ101

It's cool to have different tools in the pocket for different jobs ^_^y game development is a never ending study I think... Image below are the tools I'm playing with... I normally choose the tools which I'm comfortable using,,, just wanted to share the Image below the tools on my desktop I wanted to use on this challenge but lacks of time to study all Nyaha : - D ... wanted to study KOTLIN too as an alternative to JAVA ...

MyTools.jpg.4d35690f8a7d9419e33d9bc23b61c61b.jpg
 

June 11, 2018 03:53 AM
EddieK
8 hours ago, lawnjelly said:

Good luck with the unity version! It seems good for small games like this.

Oh, it isn't. Unity is for babies, but it does have its place. :)

Hah, do you have arguments for that? :DI probably would've agreed few days ago. But now, my view on Unity has changed. After 3 days of using it I can already see how it can make my life a lot easier. Also, it DOES require to do "real" programming. Most of my time in unity is spent staring at the C# code. Implementing pathfinding, game logic and so on still requires to do quite a bit of programming, which is great because I always loved coding. I also like how it makes it easy to do collision detection, cast rays, do all sorts of debug things like drawing gizmos in editor view and so on. All in all, Unity is awesome, but that's just my opinion :D

June 11, 2018 03:56 AM
EddieK
4 minutes ago, DexterZ101 said:

It's cool to have different tools in the pocket for different jobs ^_^y game development is a never ending study I think... Image below are the tools I'm playing with... I normally choose the tools which I'm comfortable using,,, just wanted to share the Image below the tools on my desktop I wanted to use on this challenge but lacks of time to study all Nyaha : - D ... wanted to study KOTLIN too as an alternative to JAVA ...

MyTools.jpg.4d35690f8a7d9419e33d9bc23b61c61b.jpg
 

Yup, I totally agree with you. Of course you can program everything yourself using language of your choice, but if your goal is to actually finish a game on time, then using an engine is the way to go.

June 11, 2018 04:05 AM
lawnjelly
2 hours ago, EddieK said:

Hah, do you have arguments for that? :D

Hehe you know I am only teasing! ;)

June 11, 2018 06:38 AM
EddieK
5 minutes ago, lawnjelly said:

Hehe you know I am only teasing! ;)

Oh you bastard  :D

June 11, 2018 06:46 AM
You must log in to join the conversation.
Don't have a GameDev.net account? Sign up!
Advertisement