Unity3D is a powerful suite of tools (Project IDE, Code IDE, run-time) for game development. Read my full articles of “Introduction to Unity3D” and “Tutorial Series: Unity3D & C#“.

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There is incredible momentum in the Unity3D product and its community. Here is a look at the successful game ‘Rochard’ which developers Recoil Games, Ltd created using Unity3D.

Rochard

From the IGN review of the game we learn that Rochard puts you in the role of John Rochard, an astro-miner who works for a megalithic company known as Skyrig. The game’s look works extremely well. Rochard is a comedic game at its core, and its character design, environments, enemies, sound effects and other sonic touches certainly lend to it moving in that direction.

Figure 1. Game Logo

QA With Developers

The site VideoGameWriters presented a terrific interview with Samuli Viikinen (Lead Level Designer), Juhana Virtanen (Lead Designer) and Sampsa Lehtonen (Programmer) detailing Rochard‘s use of Unity3D.

What was Unity’s appeal to your team?

The beauty of Unity is that the game can be published on any of the supported platforms with relative ease. Unity is also really fast and easy to use, making prototyping and implementing new features a breeze.

Often when any of our designers had new tech requirements, a programmer just sat next to the designer and implemented the new feature right there on spot together with the designer.

Figure 2. Gameplay

Did certain features change from the original design during development?

Yes, much. The gameplay itself was done iteratively. Unity did not impose any strict limitations to us, quite the contrary actually.

For instance, originally we didn’t have such a strong physics-based gameplay, but after seeing what Unity was capable of and learning what was possible with its physics engine we gradually implemented a more and more elaborate physics system for the game.

What are Unity’s advantages?

The strong point of Unity is the speed of the iteration cycle when developing the game. Some of the previous engines required us to shutdown the editor for compiling scripts, but in Unity the changes are immediately applied to the engine. This keeps the flow of development going instead of interrupting your work. Extending the editor was also really easy, and we ended up doing quite a lot of tools and small scripts to get rid of some of the laborious repetitive work.

Another feature is the use of so-called prefabs, which stands for “prefabricated game objects”. This allows you to build a palette of game objects that can be easily maintained and placed in the game world. This feature was found in the previous engines too, but they were far more clunky and error-prone.

Figure 3. Cut-Scene

What are Unity’s disadvantages?

Unity is not packed with rendering and animation features out-of-the-box. You can always go under the hood and implement things the way you want – that’s the whole purpose. For the games that we are making, it’s just perfect.

How has the Unity engine used by artists, programmers, level designers?

Unity is an all-around engine, and it caters to everybody in the team. Because it’s so expandable, you can improve the work flow for any discipline if such need should arise. For example, we ended up doing our custom prefab browser for the editor as our requirements for levels in our game were quite specific. We were originally using the industry standard Perforce for version control, but the built-in Asset Server in Unity had better integration to the engine so we ended up using that instead even though it was not as feature-complete as Perforce is.

Critics’ Review

IGN game the game very positive reviews. You can see gameplay footage on Youtube too.

Figure 4. Rochard’s review from IGN

Your Thoughts On Unity?

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