Embracing Unity

For a long time, I’ve avoided Unity. The biggest reason was inertia from working with MonoGame, but I was also put off by the prospect of old versions of Mono and C# as well as being generally suspicious of development being so “editor focused” (I’ve tried quite a few drag-and-drop game development tools and ultimately found them frustrating).

But I’ve decided to get over it and have a go.

The number of amazing games released that have been made with Unity has persuaded me the last point is not an issue (or perhaps no longer an issue). More importantly, there have been a few specific recent developments that have piqued my interest.

Unity joined the .NET Foundation. Unity’s .NET support always worried me a little. Using old versions of Mono and C# was bad, and their support for JavaScript made me a little worried they might just drop C# altogether. This is obviously not going to happen now (at least in the near future).

Related to the previous point (but more to do with Mono being released under a permissive license) is that they really are pushing forward with an updated version of .NET.

The final reason is the discovery that Distinctive Games, a mobile game developer I used to work for have decided to use Unity for (at least) one of their upcoming games, Downhill Extreme 2.

The net result of this is that I have started working on another version of Gravitas in Unity. And after about half an hour I have a star field, and a ship (with a colorizable section) that rotates when you press left and right.