Switching to Unity

Greenheart Games
#1

Game Dev Tycoon was written in HTML5. A fact that often surprises other developers and gamers alike. Coming from a Windows-y background myself (C#, Winforms, WPF), I have really grown to like HTML5 as a technology and as a community. There is something very freeing about JavaScript and open-tech in general and we are proud to have made some small contributions to this community. We definitely don’t regret using HTML5 for Game Dev Tycoon in the slightest and I think our technology choice for GDT will still have some fruits to bear (more on that in a later post :))

Anyway, last year, while working on our new projects with 2D and 2.5D techniques in HTML5, we started looking into 3D with the use of three.js - It quickly became clear that 3D is the right choice for the type of game that we want to make and while we were astonished by what can be done with three.js, it was also apparent that we were constantly on the bleeding edge of technology. We spent the majority of time developing the underlying tech for the game instead of working on gameplay.

To put it into Game Dev Tycoon’s terms: We focused too much on technology, not enough on design and simply didn’t have enough engineering power to make the progress we want.

This year we again took a look at Unity. Last time we investigated the engine, we discarded it due to poor support for GUI but since Unity 4.6+ GUI support seems to have gotten better.

In the end Unity just seems to offer a more streamlined workflow, with more varied and stable components. While I think we could develop our game in HTML5 too, the journey would likely be much longer and we would require a lot more engineering power. Ultimately we want to deliver a new game to our fans sooner rather than later and we think that Unity will allow us to focus on what’s most important to us: creating a fun game.

Switching engines (and learning a new technology) means we will have to restart our project and it will likely be a while longer before we can really share details about our next game but from what we’ve seen of Unity, we should be able to quickly make up for this delay.

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Charlie, Patrick, when will we get news about your new game?
A small recap of 2015
A small recap of 2014 and some hints on our next projects
#2

Aww, man! If you were switching to another engine, I would have hoped you took something open-source at least :I Well, Godot is still getting that Visual Shader Editor :stuck_out_tongue: And you would be able to not use DirectX - that is certainly not good!

#3

I’d love to stick with open tech but the reason we want to move to Unity is to get the benefits of a well-established tool. Godot or Paradox3d (to name another interesting open source project) are simply too new. We’d switch from bleeding edge to a different bleeding edge.

#4

The reason I suggested it to you is that Godot 1.1 is coming out incredibly soon, and it would be a great time to just get into the engine and learn it before switching to the stable. The thing is, Godot has such a wonderful community and the developers respond to anything posted in their Facebook group. I see bug fixes daily, and its got an incredible language called GDScript. Exports into HTML5 too! You know, I was just a little disappointed. I hate Unity (for proper reasons) and I would not like you getting on that boat too. But each to his own, I guess.

#5

Why are we talking about Call of Duty all of a sudden

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#6

Unity’s gui kinda sucked, they actually roped in one of the 3rd party plugin people to work on the new UI.

I’m really excited about the sound systems they are going to be releasing as part of 5.0.

Been trying to get a JSON api support going so I can use unity as ‘just another front end’ for my JS based ant game. High speed socket support is a bit of a challenge.

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#7

It seems like you would love Godot :smiley: JSON support out of the box, exports to HTML5! (as of 1.1, not releaed stable yet)

#8

I like the comical design :frowning:

#9

Did you guy’s look at LibGDX framework?

#10

Or maybe at JMonkeyEngine? :smile:
In the end it probably boils down to which technology/language you already know and not exactly to open/closed source.

#11

Will you be using Unity or Unity Pro?