Five Reasons to Choose Unity 3D Game Engine for Your Game Development Studio (Blog)

So you are super excited!  You decided to become a game developer.  Congratulations!  What game development platform will you be using?

….crickets….followed by the sound of a frog jumping into a pond.

I will lay out the five most important criteria (imho) for choosing your game dev engine and then attempt to sway you to choosing Unity 3D as it fits the bill nicely.

Five Important Aspects to Choosing a Game Development Package

1.   Have an abundance of tutorials = Have a big healthy community

2.  Be able to do 2D and 3D games relatively easy within the same package

3.  Code once, deploy to many platforms

4.  Be free to start with

5.  Have a great asset store

….Let’s discuss these topics

Have an abundance of tutorials = Have a big healthy community

Whether you are starting out or further along the game development path, you will always be learning.  You need to quickly and easily be able to identify resources that can help you along the way.  Resources are created by people and the more people in your community, the better off you are.

Here are a few quick facts that I got from the Unit 3D public relations site (November 17 2017) :

• 5 Billion Made With Unity game downloads Q4 2016 alone
• 2.4 Billion unique devices running Made With Unity
• 34% Of top 1000 free games are Made With Unity
• 
• Unity touches 700 Million active users all over the world!  Crazy.
• Unity is growing fast and getting more reach around the world, especially in the mobile space

….And probably the most important factoid: Unity has over 4.5 Million registered developers!!!

When you develop in Unity you are surrounded by the largest ecosystem of game developers.  Many of them (like me) also go on to create amazing tutorials to help others hone in their skills.

Be able to do 2D and 3D games relatively easy within the same package

So this is a tricky one.  You might be solely trying to do 3D or 2D.  I started out just wanting to use Unity for 3D when developing my game Animal Rampage.  It only took my 4 months to learn Unity and develop my first game in Unity at the same time!  But then I changed my mind for the next project and wanted to do a 2D game.  This happens.  I discovered how amazingly easy it was to switch to 2D in Unity and developed Endless Ninja Drop in 1 month again while learning to do 2D in Unity.  I’ve never used Unreal Engine 4  but I’ve read how it is mainly poised to handle high end polished 3D games, but does not do to well on the 2D side.  Check out this blog for a nice side by side comparison of Unity VS Unreal Engine.

Code once, deploy to many platforms

Originally when I became a professional game developer, I started out the hard way, coding my own game engine for my 2D game, MineSweep Jet Hero.  I developed natively in Xcode using Objective-C and used 3rd party 2D frameworks like Cocos2D.  It took my one year to build that game.  When I wanted to port it to Android, I discovered it will probably take me another 6-12 months to code natively in Java.  What a pain.  That project stopped dead in it’s tracks.  I started researching different platforms and stumbled upon Unity.  Besides two versions of the in-app purchase and leader boards’ code (about a 5% overhead), I was able to easily build cross-platform iOS and Android versions of my game:

Animal Rampage Android – Animal Rampage iOS

Be free to start with

We all love free stuff!!!!  Yes yes yes:) . So I remember back in the day during the dotCom boom, it was difficult to find free to try software except for sometimes in the educational space.  That lead many people to pirate software who were desperate to learn something but could not afford it.  The times have changes and the world is a better place for it.  Unity has three price models :

Quoted From: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2016/06/16/evolution-of-our-products-and-pricing/

Unity Personal

Free

$100k revenue or funding cap

All platforms

Unity splash screen (with customization options)

Personal tier services

Unity Plus

Pay $35 per month with 12 month commitment

$200k revenue or funding cap

All platforms

Optional Unity splash screen (with customization options)

Dark Editor Skin

Plus tier services

Unity Pro

Pay $125 per month with 12 month commitment

No revenue cap

All platforms

Optional Unity splash screen (with customization options)

Dark Editor Skin

Pro tier services

Pay to Own

So you get some time to (hopefully) grow into the various price models.

Have a great asset store

I absolutely love the Unity Asset Store.  I was trying to figure out how many assets they have total, but the only hint I got was from the Google indexes snippet:

Unity Asset Store

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/Choose  from 15000+ free and paid-for 3D models, editor extensions, scripts,  shaders, materials, audio files, animations and more to power up your Unity project.

So if the above metadata is correct, there are 15000 plus total assets.  This includes scripts like AI path-finding, 2D and 3D assets.  For my 3D game Animal Rampage, I purchased an animal pack for $125 that came per-animated with a ton of awesome animations.  For my 2D game Endless Ninja Drop, I actually purchased a demo of a game that I altered into a never ending game that gets more difficult as you fall down.  I wanted to see how quickly I can take an existing game template and turn into my own vision.  It took me 4 weeks, not too bad.  You can compare my game against the original started pack.  Hmmm….maybe I should write a blog on using game started packs…

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/23268

Now, before I started using Unity and I was developing native Objective-C on Xcode, I actually paid over $1000 for 2D graphics working with Whale Shark Studio for a 2D game idea called DustBunny ( I might revive it because I love my character so much).  I worked thru a website (what used to be elance) and the experience was awesome, but it was a tad bit expensive.  On the Unity Asset Store, they have really good prices and often huge discount sales.  You can really find top quality stuff.  Sometimes, I just browse the Asset Store looking for inspiration and start a game that way, like I did for Endless Ninja Drop.

Final Words

I think Unity is an amazing game development platform for all the reasons I listed above.  I unfortunately don’t have much experience with Unreal Engine, I am sure there will be some aspects that are better in that platform.  Please comment below if you use Unreal or other platforms that support both 2D and 3D development in the same package so we can all learn from each other.