It has been a little over a month since we released our first game made with Unity, Star Drive.
In contrast, for our first game – Mutant Mashup (2018), we used MonoGame with Xamarin. MonoGame, unlike Unity, is not a full game engine – but rather a low-level game API. In other words, we wrote a whole bunch of code to do things that are included in Unity. The advantage to MonoGame was the flexibility to customize everything from the ground up – physics fundamentals, double buffer graphics, click detection, frame level animations, and web service calls. By the time we were done, though, we’d used several open source libraries and tools to fulfill a lot of needs that a mature game engine provides right out of the box – a Box2D port for physics, Spriter for creating usable spritesheets, and Tiled for creating levels. It made the learning curve different and new for each library or tool and made troubleshooting difficult for our Google-fu.
The Unity IDE also had a steep learning curve that we were able to accelerate thanks to the countless tutorials on Pluralsight and Youtube. One of the challenges we faced is determine how to do things the “Unity way”. With the powerful C# scripting components, it can be easy to attempt too much in code when you don’t know about all the tools already built into the IDE. We are currently working on another game developed with Unity and taking advantage of even more great features. It has allowed us to create a genuinely polished game play that we are very excited to share.
Our newest game combines elements of fighting game and RPG genres with a word puzzle core mechanic. Create words connecting letters on the wheel makes your character do attacks to damage the enemy. Bigger words make a bigger attack and attacks can be chained to make combos. We’ll be posting updates here as we get closer, but here’s a short video and a few screens of where we’re at!
