Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Skipping Over The Stupid Parts

For anyone who hasn't heard yet, the latest free version of the Unity game development tool allows export to Android and iOS platforms for no additional cost. As a result, I've been able to essentially completely rebuild the game I've been working on, minus the optimization and library issues, in less than eight hours. Runs smooth as silk and I wrote less then 50 lines of code.

This is why I like Unity so much. The Java-based version of my game had a substantial amount of code devoted to basic, Game Development 101 problems, like maintaining frame rate, or rendering 3d objects, or creating and destroying the objects necessary for each level of the game. I hate spending time on this stuff; this is all basic game housekeeping nonsense that's been written countless times before, and I resent having to waste effort on it when I want to be assembling the actual game. I want to pay attention to the game mechanics, introducing challenge and rewards and appeal.

What I don't want to do is what I've been faced with in the Java version of the game: spending endless hours staring at source code, reading through forums, and conducting experiments just to figure out how to make a physics library perform properly.

This should give me the edge that I need to actually finish this game and have a reasonably stable product, rather than an unreliable mess that I really shouldn't be installing on anyone's devices.

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