It is free. You have to show their logo in the free version. A number of features are pro only which may or may not effect you. http://unity3d.com/unity/licenses
Yup. Personally, I haven't needed the pro version yet but I would like it at some stage. Profiler would be great.
If you are making a game which pushes the device the profiler is priceless however for a standard more simple mobile game you can easily get away without it. You mainly want to keep the number of devices you can run on wide range of devices which means you aren't really pushing the edge graphically.
Well, my cars are 20k+ polys each and the track is pretty detailed, mesh wise, so I guess you could say I'm "pushing it". I haven't "needed" the profiler yet, would just make it a bit easier to spot bottlenecks. I have the game running on iPhone4 (possibly 3GS) and up but obviously there are concessions made for lower devices
need is a relative word I would die without it at work, but on my personal apps I would be fine without it. There are pretty much work arounds for most things in unity so you can do anything in the free version. Monument valley was made in unity, how awesome is that?
I haven't seen it. But yeah, the free version is awesome and you can use Xcode's profiler to get an idea of what's going wrong. But yeah, I'd love to be able to afford pro
For many types of 2D games I recommend Corona SDK. http://CoronaLabs.com It's limited at this point to mobile devices, but they're beta-testing an HTML5 build option which could be used for desktop. It's a code-only solution (no drag and drop stuff right now) but there's a free Starter edition and it has a *really* nice SDK that makes most stuff quick and easy to do. Code: alien = display.newImage("images/ufo.png") That displays an image on the screen (and is actually a complete program you could build to device). Want to make it travel across the screen? Code: transition.to (alien {time=1000, x=500}) It uses Lua as the language which, while not common, is easy to pick up and really rocks when you get to know it. Jay
Well yes, Corona looks good too, but their pricing is really odd, actually. For what it does there are better solutions out there.
