Unity 3D - So who all here is using it and for what

TelekineticFrog

I know I've spotted that several of us on these forums are using Unity on a pretty regular basis for side projects, work and other things. I just was wondering who all in total is using it currently to make games either at work or for fun as side projects. I myself have been using it since last year and am using it for side projects making games on the iOS platform mainly targeting iPad / iPad2. I've been mainly learning and using C# for all scripting/code work, art via 3DS Max and Photoshop. It would be nice to know who all else is doing projects using it and get a better idea of how big that sub community is within Polycount.

Axios

At work, it's our engine of choice for a number of projects for browser, mobile, and standalone games. I really enjoy it and because of that I do play around with it for side projects in my own time. However, I do still prefer UDK when it comes to art stuff.

Edit: Though Unity is no slouch on the art side. I do love using Strumpy Shader Editor and beast lightmapping.

MrOneTwo

I'm actually creating a game in it. I learned some C++ here and there but now I'm using C# with Unity. I love how friendly Unity is. I tried to start programming simple games in UDK... no luck. Its too big to wrap my head around it. With prefabs and really friendly coding I can do much more with less problems in Unity. I'm no programmer. I just started doing it because its really easy in Unity.

I'm creating this little game with a space ship seen from top view. Like Ikaruga. For Now I have flying, shooting bullets/rockets, flying asteroids , scrolling background and collisions coded. Its super fun to learn programming with Unity. Documentation is great too.

Didn't use Unity for strictly art purposes.

ambershee

I looked at it when I was looking for a decent engine with stencil buffer access, but it doesn't have it. The cost of commercially licensing it put me off, so I've stuck with UDK for the time being (which also doesn't have stencil buffer access).

uncle

Soon I'm starting a prototype of immersive forklift simulator. I hope for the best, Unity didn't disappoint me so far, I love writing in c#

Joseph Silverman

Playing around with making an isometricish action shooter in my spare time. Java and groping in the dark.

mdeforge

I'm taking my capstone classes for my game dev degree right now, and both of them are Unity classes. I really like Unity thus far, a lot better than I liked the UDK. I can't wait until I graduate this spring so I can spend the summer working on personal projects.

skylebones

I was introduced to it back in 2009 for a freelance gig. Ended up jumping ship from console games to browser games after I was offered a job doing browser games. And like everyone else, I'm making my own games at home with it.

MainManiac

Im currently a partner and artist in a Unity IOS app

MikeF

With the company i'm at now we use it for medical training and visualization, at home i use it for prototyping quick game ideas and features. It's got its limitations, but still my engine of choice

Farfarer

I've been using it about a year now. Messing with lots of stuff, currently working on a mobile point-and-click adventure.

gsokol

Yup, learned about it and used it at my last job...at a military training/simulation company. Mainly because it is hella cheap to use commercially, and we did browser based projects/iPad projects most of the time.

I still mess with it for fun sometimes...just because throwing somebody a web build of an environment or something is such an awesome feature.

Guriamo

i am using Unity for my weekend side project on iOS. Excellent tool to get more into the coding side.

Lord McMutton

I use it for my one-man indie... Team. Currently working on a game similar to Zelda/Okami, the thread of which you may have seen resurface recently.

Tigerfeet

The programmer I'm working with is using Unity as his engine. It's just him (what makes it work) and me (what makes it pretty).

Nostradamus

Currently working on a 2d platformer thingy.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGvyjtAaYhE"]SURTR - YouTube[/ame] (placeholder music and most other things as well :P )

RyanB

I sell assets on the Unity asset store. http://www.youtube.com/user/ryanjamesblanchard

I'm taking baby steps towards making small games using Unity. Goal for this year is ten packs in the asset store and one game prototyped.

seforin

both work and for my side project both can be seen here


www.moonspiderstudio.com
www.beachfrontgames.com

Ged

my work uses unity pretty much all the time now, its pretty cool if a little bit messy sometimes. C# is the weapon of choice and we cant do anything too crazy because of the fact we make mobile games, but it seems good. Heres a game we made in it, I did most of the in game artwork, not responsible for the cheesy video or music haha.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKo5boAc19A"]Traffic Panic 3D coming soon to iPhone & Android - YouTube[/ame]

MainManiac

RyanB wrote: »

I sell assets on the Unity asset store. http://www.youtube.com/user/ryanjamesblanchard

I'm taking baby steps towards making small games using Unity. Goal for this year is ten packs in the asset store and one game prototyped.

Does it actually get good money? (the store)?

Brendan

Made a racing game for end-of-uni project as part of small team. In the next few weeks we might be having a competition.

download at slipstreamgame.com

crazyfingers

Started hunkering down and building my own game for unity in my spare time. Can't choose between art and game design so figure i'd do both. Picking up C# as i go.

Thread is here:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=93853

Who knows where it'll go, in the meantime just trying to develope decent programming skills and in the long run deliver professional quality art assets to boot.

stuART_3dee

I was introduced to Unity last year. Didn't delve too much into until this past month. Our latest game did not use any lights (all painted) . For our upcoming update, we're playing around with Beast and light mapping. I've been testing on 2 levels the last 2 wks. I'm getting some pretty nice results especially through GI.

I'll be using Unity for my latest personal project as well.

http://www.youtube.com/XoobisGames
http://www.zombiewonderland.com/

kio

been using it at work and for several side projects - im also looking at the code side of things and now im building a small casual game called "Greedy Cookie" with unity (i might roll out for flash and mobile). i moved from c# to boo, as i prefer the python like syntax much more (i learned a bit of python a few months back so im more familiar with it) - downside is there isnt much public available code. but most of the time its a nobrainer to convert code to boo. other than that it works great.

RyanB

frell wrote: »

Does it actually get good money? (the store)?

I am very happy with the amount I've made (so far) but that might be different for someone else. I think you can definitely use it for a nice side income. No complaints from me and Unity is very easy to deal with.

I think the best test is to make something of good quality and put it on the store.

Elyaradine

We've been using it on Bladeslinger. It lacks a lot of tools I think, which makes some of our artists not enjoy it as much, but it's really great for programming, and if you're a capable scripter then you can often ease the pain for your artists too.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhr5vzvbNWE"]Bladeslinger Official Teaser Trailer (iPhone, iPad, Android, Tegra) - YouTube[/ame]

It's also mostly the engine of choice for a lot of our game jams and indie stuff because of how quickly you can prototype stuff, and how, when it's done, you can port it to several different platforms.

Maph

I'm a Unity whore, and I love it to bits. Great for programmers and with a little bit of automating scripts, great for artists as well.
I'm working with Micheal Dashow on MageMaze for a while now outside our day jerbs, and we're finally getting there with all the pieces coming together.

Elyaradine: Bladeslinger looks amazing! Another kickass job from Luma Arcade.

Kwramm

Maph wrote: »

I'm a Unity whore, and I love it to bits. Great for programmers and with a little bit of automating scripts, great for artists as well.
I'm working with Micheal Dashow on MageMaze for a while now outside our day jerbs, and we're finally getting there with all the pieces coming together.

I love the look of that game! shame I ditched my old 3G for an android phone

Goeddy

im using unity at work, for games and augmented reality stuff. very nice engine, but for me the lacking support of blendshapes is realy a letdown.
and they should team up with strumpy and implement his shader editor.

skylebones

Goeddy wrote: »

and they should team up with strumpy and implement his shader editor.

The guy that made strumpy works at Unity. He made it as a side project, but they really should incorporate it.

Davision3D

Im using Unity a lot, for paid works aswell as own projects. I currently work on a 3d puzzle game called Space Shapes together with a programmer, we also entered the unity flash contest with it. I also do a lot of work for the crescent moon iOS unity games, recently released is Paper Monsters which i did a lot of work for. Its really the best engine for mobile and now with flash support it should also expand really well in the brower games market.

I also currently work on a UDK mobile game and i more and more regret choosing that engine. Its just a too chunky beast for mobile it seems. Unity can run well on 1st gen devices and the engines performance gets better with every release. The mobile Unreal engine on the other hand didnt got a single performance improvement in its one year of existence, it only got worse! At this time its very hard to get a game run smooth on the 4th gen devices, not to mention the strange crashes that can happen on 256mb ram devices. Its really a shame where the engine has some great easy to use features and i love to work with kismet.

If you want to make a 3d mobile game Unity is definately the engine too chose IMO. Im still hoping though that the mobile unreal engine gets a significant performance improvement in one of its many releases.

Kyuuu

I've been doing 3d modeling for a few years now and some months ago I wanted to learn to use at least one game engine to show my work outside of 3ds max. I tried UDK but it was too complicated for me at the time so I tried Unity instead. I managed to grasp the basics quite fast and exported a few scenes I already created with 3ds max.

After a few weeks of working on Unity I came back to UDK and it's going much better. While Unity is a bit limited, I really like it because it's easy to use and not as tedious as UDK. The result is not the same of course but I'm enjoying Unity a lot more than UDK.

Ged

Davision3D wrote: »

recently released is Paper Monsters which i did a lot of work for. Its really the best engine for mobile and now with flash support it should also expand really well in the brower games market.

Congrats on releasing a quality little game! and totally agree about unity, it is a little annoying to make 2D games/ui in it, lots of plugins etc :P

Peris

I've been working on an FPS with procedural level generation for a while now in unity. I'll have to show it off one of these days here...

I love love love unity btw, best game engine I've ever worked with by far!

Davision3D

Ged wrote: »

Congrats on releasing a quality little game! and totally agree about unity, it is a little annoying to make 2D games/ui in it, lots of plugins etc :P

Thx, i created most of the monsters and helped developing the style.

Campaignjunkie

having come from working with Source, the pipeline for Unity is absolutely beautiful... you drop a .MB or .FBX in your Assets folder, open Unity, and you're done: colliders setup, automatic lightmap UVs, materials setup, etc.

holyjewsus

I've been using unity about 8 months, I'm currently working on my thesis building a drawing/sketching application in it, and I've done some arch viz work for some of my designs with it.

www.archiware.wordpress.com

wailingmonkey

Goeddy -> http://www.west-racing.com/mf/?page_id=2

never used it personally, but seems pretty hawt stuff.

Maph

Ged wrote: »

...it is a little annoying to make 2D games/ui in it, lots of plugins etc :P

Slightly offtrack here, but have you tried using Brady's tools for UIs and 2D games? Our game (entirely 2D) makes exclusive use of SpriteManager, and it absolutely rocks.
It's not the best tool out there for UIs and 2D games imho, but it sure as hell beats manually setting up your button meshes, or packing a sprite sheet, and other related 2D manual labor.

EtotheRic

We are using it at work for all our games. It's pretty easy to use compared to typical in-house engines.

Calabi

Looks like the question should be more like who isnt using Unity.

I'm also using, not doing much though, just messing around.

TelekineticFrog

Actually this is great! I wanted to get an idea of how big the internal community was here for using Unity. I suspected it was a good size group but it is nice for getting a bigger picture of just how many of us are using it. I'm wondering if maybe making a Unity based sticky thread within the Technical Talk sub forum would be something worth bringing up. Just so if any case there is an immediate path to Unity based knowledge on the forum here that pertains to game creation. Definitely would be useful I think.

Ged

Maph wrote: »

Slightly offtrack here, but have you tried using Brady's tools for UIs and 2D games? Our game (entirely 2D) makes exclusive use of SpriteManager, and it absolutely rocks.
It's not the best tool out there for UIs and 2D games imho, but it sure as hell beats manually setting up your button meshes, or packing a sprite sheet, and other related 2D manual labor.

yup thats what we use too. Its quite easy to get your spritesheets messed up though, especially when there is more than one of you working on level assets. its more of a collaboration problem than a 2D sprite problem I guess.

Maph

Ged: Ah yes, that makes sense. It's usually myself doing all the sprite setups, so I always have full control over every sheet.
Maybe you should try locking the asset via version control to yourself before you build? And commit/unlock it when you're done.

TelekineticFrog: A unity dedicated sticky would be cool yes.

Joseph Silverman

unity sticky yes!

Lucas Annunziata

Yeah, I've been working on a small team project with a few people making a unity game. I'm the environment artist/art director. I'd still rather be working in UDK, but sometimes ya gotta make some sacrifices. Heres a screeny:


I've also been doing some freelance texture work for a unity game.

Cint128

Were using it at work because of its licensing options and multi platform support, I think its has a nice workflow to it as well. We create plant control systems, 3d traing/inductions and visualisation, mainly for mining companies atm. We need to update a few things on our website but there's a quick induction demo we did recently up there.

Website
http://www.sencom.com.au/

Ged

Maph wrote: »

Ged: Ah yes, that makes sense. It's usually myself doing all the sprite setups, so I always have full control over every sheet.
Maybe you should try locking the asset via version control to yourself before you build? And commit/unlock it when you're done.

Yeah versions helps but not enough when there are multiple level builders. Sometimes we have 4 of us on one project and its a real pain to bring it all together in the end. Hopefully unity will have better collaboration in the future, we almost always find script settings or materials have changed or links been lost when we hand packages, prefabs or unity files to eachother. Luckily its usually fairly simple to put back the way it should be, just laborious if there is a lot of content.

Davision3D wrote: »

Thx, i created most of the monsters and helped developing the style.

Just out of curiousity how long do you guys take to make a game like that from concept/prototype to full release? We often only get 2 to 3 months to make a mobile game where I work.

Ged

sorry double post

SpookyCat

wailingmonkey wrote: »

Goeddy -> http://www.west-racing.com/mf/?page_id=2

never used it personally, but seems pretty hawt stuff.

That is a rather splendid looking system, worth it for the morphing alone but could have some fun with all the other deformation and animation stuff.

Zephiris

I've been working on a unity indie game with a friend for a while now but can't really show that one just yet ~ But I've got something else!
We made this for the Flash in a Flash contest where you had to make a flash game with their new beta flash player build in 14 days. Actual time spent on it was even less than that, so there's a lot of stuff we wanted to add+polish but didn't have the time to(yet), and since it was the beta build there might be slowdowns in firefox (try another browser if it happens) plus it won't run on onboard cards...Um yeah enough excuses, give it a try @ http://lvl7.de/chaoscomet.html and enjoy
Ill keep working hard on this to make it a full game which won't be suffering from the current flash player beta issues and have a lot more to offer
Comments are always appreciated ~