Back to Blogging?

Things are moving fast enough that there is a pressing need to keep some type of record of progress, regardless of unlikelihood that the record will be complete. There are a number of things coming up on the horizon, and there are a number of things going on right now.

Going on right now, Unity Pro is a saviour at work. The corporate process is sufficiently inefficient that tools of remarkable efficiency are required to keep things moving forward. Unity has not only allowed us to build a number of publishable games in a matter of weeks, it has also allowed us to build a number of in-house technical prototypes to settle perennial technical issues.

My birthday is coming up. This year, everyone who wants to is going to buy me a Mac so that I can Unity Indie at home. To participate, contribute any amount of money large or small, designated for the "Mac for Shannon's Birthday". At this point, even contributions of moral support would be appreciated.

Which leads us to what is coming up on the horizon. Once I get my Mac, I will be able to publish SHANNONWARE GAME LAB-made games on the Web and Mac. If that is successful as a business endeavour, I will get Unity Pro myself some time early next year and move on to publishing games for PC. In other news, yesterday I ordered a new phone yesterday from my medieval telecom provider Rogers, the HTC Touch. Basically, as a member of the Microsoft Developer Network (oooh, I feel so special), I can develop an XNA Game Studio game for the HTC right out of the box. And that point leads us to the mosts significant discussion of the day: Unity versus XNA.

Background: Unity 3D is a level editor/game engine/publishing platform all in one. It makes the rapid development of games really easy, especially compared to many of the other game engines available today. If that is not enough, the Game Engine Royalty imposed by Unity is the best possible: $0, i.e. 0%. If you build a game with Unreal or Virtools, expect them to ask for a piece of every copy that you sell. Not so with Unity, and this is perhaps the best part of all. And this is where XNA comes in. In an ongoing effort to dominate the video games industry, and to provide a larger development community for its Xbox 360 console than it had for its Xbox console, Microsoft has made XNA available for free. Which means that you can build imersive 3D (or 2D) video games for the PC for no additional outlay for middleware. The caveat here is that (in my humble opinion) XNA requires real programming expertise in order to adeptly manipulate the C# code required. Unity also uses C#; however the 'UnityEngine' takes care of most of the boiler-plate operations that would be required by a game application, especially relating to the manipulation of visual and audio assets. At the end of the day, Unity Pro and XNA can produce comparable PC executables; however, under the hood, they are quite different.

So, provided that

Time = Money

we can understand that

Time spent doing technically demanding programming in XNA on the PC I already have >= Cost of Mac + Cost of Unity

And no matter how little money we have, it seems we always have even less time.

Now, going back to the HTC, it seems I will be able to at least embark on building my first game for it using XNA Game Studio as soon as it arrives. But ultimately (and this is where the horizon comes back in), I would like to somehow extend Unity to publish games not just for iPod and iPhone, but for Windows Mobile as well. It is a lofty goal, I will admit, but with the power of Mono, we are closer than we have ever been.