How to Finish Your First Game When You Can’t Seem to Finish Your First Game
gamasutra.comThis is the first long piece of writing I've done in a while - I'm pretty happy with it, would love to hear what people think!
Congrats for shipping and thanks for the write-up. I think you should follow up with how you found developing the game with Unity3D.
Also had a quick look at your game. I tried the web version. I like the animation of the astronaut, but all in all it probably needs a bit more polish and it's quite difficult - even more so than Flappy Bird. Maybe it's easier on a touch device.
Thanks!
I'll follow up a little bit right here:
Developing with Unity was great overall. Luckily my partner has experience, which accelerated my learning a lot.
The 2 biggest challenges I found were not related to Unity, but to going from web development (my day job) to game development.
1. Programming in 3D: Not much I can say about this since I still struggle with it, except that once I understood vector maths a little more it got much much easier. Even just this silly site helped a lot: https://www.mathsisfun.com/algebra/vectors.html
2. Programming in a game loop: The main thing I've learned about this is to always keep things "event driven" as in, whenever possible trying to avoid checking for something happening in the game loop, and trying to instead have some kind of listener for a change that triggers what you need it to. Also, building state machines is something we're doing now and that has made logic inside the game loop WAY easier.
One other nice thing about Unity was that it reminded me about all the great things about object oriented programming.
Some bad things about Unity:
1. Not super easy to find answers to stuff online. Stack overflow just isn't quite as full in this area.
2. Unity Asset store: I think part of the reason for the first problem is that people are trying to sell their solutions, which ends up limiting free or open source growth.
On cross platform stuff: It worked like a charm, with a couple hiccups: Leaderboard integration and facebook sharing, but since those are platform specific in some ways anyway, that's to be expected - more about configuration really.
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Anyway, thanks for the comment. We're polishing a bit more now, hopefully an update in the coming months. Yes, it's very hard. That's been difficult to get right... but our next game will be much easier!