Creating iPhone Games with Unity?

[Twiddle]

Hey, I was wondering what you developers that have used Unity before to develop games thought about it, apposed to iPhone SDK. I'm not sure if I'm willing to spend $500 to get a Mac Mini or not.

Here is the site: www.unity3d.com

[mehware]

I use Unity in all my games. My most recent game is Lockdown (see thread) that was created in Unity.

I would recommend playing with Unity 3D the free version before you decide to buy a mac mini and the iPhone Basic license. Play around with it, do some tutorials, you'll love it.

http://unity3d.com/unity/download/

Then when your ready its fairly easy to port your game to the iPhone Basic version of Unity.

The Unity forums are very helpful, its a good community.

EDIT: I forgot to mention you can download the iPhone trial for 30 days too once you have your mac!

- Matt
Mehware

[Twiddle]

Originally Posted by mehware

I use Unity in all my games. My most recent game is Lockdown (see thread) that was created in Unity.

I would recommend playing with Unity 3D the free version before you decide to buy a mac mini and the iPhone Basic license. Play around with it, do some tutorials, you'll love it.

http://unity3d.com/unity/download/

Then when your ready its fairly easy to port your game to the iPhone Basic version of Unity.

The Unity forums are very helpful, its a good community.

EDIT: I forgot to mention you can download the iPhone trial for 30 days too once you have your mac!

- Matt
Mehware

Mehware, do I have to have a mac to publish my game? I'm a bit confused. I thought the iPhone SDK created the games, and Unity was an alternative, so I wouldn't need a Mac.

[Zincous]

Originally Posted by Twiddle

Mehware, do I have to have a mac to publish my game? I'm a bit confused. I thought the iPhone SDK created the games, and Unity was an alternative, so I wouldn't need a Mac.

No, you need a mac to run Xcode (which makes the apps)

Unity just puts the game you make into a format that Xcode can read.

So either way you need a mac to make a game.

[Manojalpa]

We used Unity3D to create Tipoli and are incredibly happy with it. The only down side is that it's virtually impossible to create a game with unity that comes in under the 10 MB limit for their network downloads. But as mentioned, toy around with the free version and use some of the tutorials. Part of why it worked so well for us was because we had a relatively no0bish programmer and a lot of level design to do (which Unity does incredibly well).

[matt.johnson.mobile]

I have used Unity for a couple of years for both desktop apps and iPhone apps. My most recent game, Doodle Bomb, is built in Unity and comes in @ 9.5 Mb with networking support for Flurry analytics. I highly recommend it for rapid development cycles.

Matt

http://bit.ly/doodlebomb

[mehware]

Originally Posted by matt.johnson.mobile

I have used Unity for a couple of years for both desktop apps and iPhone apps. My most recent game, Doodle Bomb, is built in Unity and comes in @ 9.5 Mb with networking support for Flurry analytics. I highly recommend it for rapid development cycles.

Matt

http://bit.ly/doodlebomb

I don't know how you squeeze all that fun into 9.5 megs. Our latest game is 49.2 megs! We have a lot of content and knew we couldn't get under the 10 megs.

I think Apple/AT&T needs to raise the limit to 50megs

Good luck with Doodle Bomb. Shows what Unity can do in 2D!

- Matt
mehware

[WellSpentYouth]

Originally Posted by matt.johnson.mobile

I have used Unity for a couple of years for both desktop apps and iPhone apps. My most recent game, Doodle Bomb, is built in Unity and comes in @ 9.5 Mb with networking support for Flurry analytics. I highly recommend it for rapid development cycles.

Matt

http://bit.ly/doodlebomb

Great job on getting it under 10MB! The current game, Empty City 3D (under review), is 12.3MB. I don't have Unity iPhone Pro though, so I don't have the advantage of the stripping assets feature.

Sorry, but that rapid development sentence made me laugh, I spent 6 months on Empty City 3D That is a pretty long time for an iPhone game A lot of that time adjusting over to Unity, so my future project will probably zoom right along.

[spacefrog]

I have used Unity for a couple of years for both desktop apps and iPhone apps. My most recent game, Doodle Bomb, is built in Unity and comes in @ 9.5 Mb with networking support for Flurry analytics. I highly recommend it for rapid development cycles.

Matt

http://bit.ly/doodlebomb

Yeah - it's still the assets making the gamesize grow over 10MB. And all those handdrawn doodles surely compress fairly well, even after Apples DRM treatmill. But i think it's a great thumbs up again for Unity, did'nt expect doodle bomb to be made in Unity. I think i grab doddle-bomb than, just to get another argument against the penny-pincher sitting in my brain, saying i should wait with the 2K purchase of my own personal copy of Unity iPhone. I allready developed 3 Games using Unity iPhone for the company i work for.....

Sorry, but that rapid development sentence made me laugh

Unity is the closed thing in terms of serious Rapid Gamedev Environment you can get. Some kind of Delphi or C++Builder for Realtime/Game Development, even better...

[Eric5h5]

Originally Posted by spacefrog

And all those handdrawn doodles surely compress fairly well, even after Apples DRM treatmill.

Apple only applies DRM to the executable itself, making it not compress much anymore after it's on the App Store. The rest of the assets are untouched, so they compress as well (or not as well, depending) as they do normally. Personally I'm not too concerned about the 10MB thing; I was quite happy with how Realmaze3D did at 14MB, thanks mostly to being featured by Touch Arcade and Apple, which beats being less than 10MB any day.

--Eric