Welcome to Unity 3D!
Now that you've installed the Web Player, you can view the content created with the Unity 3D authoring tool in your browser.
What can I build with Unity?
In order to fully appreciate how fancy this new hammer is, let's take a look at some projects that other people have created with Unity. While these games may be completely out of our reach at the moment, let's find out how game developers have pushed this amazing tool to its very limits.
FusionFall
The first stop on our whirlwind Unity tour is FusionFall—a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG). You can find it at fusionfall.com. You may need to register to play, but it's definitely worth the extra effort!
FusionFall was commissioned by the Cartoon Network television franchise, and takes place in a re-imagined, anime-style world where popular Cartoon Network characters are all grown up. Darker and more sophisticated versions of the Powerpuff Girls, Dexter, Foster and his imaginary friends, and the kids from Codename: Kids Next Door run around battling a slimy green alien menace.
Completely hammered
FusionFall is a very big and very expensive high-profile game that helped draw a lot of attention to the then-unknown Unity game engine when the game was released. As a tech demo, it's one of the very best showcases of what your new technological hammer can really do! FusionFall has real-time multiplayer networking, chat, quests, combat, inventory, NPCs (non-player characters), basic AI (artificial intelligence), name generation, avatar creation, and costumes. And that's just a highlight of the game's feature set. This game packs a lot of depth.
Should we try to build FusionFall?
At this point, you might be thinking to yourself: "Heck YES! FusionFall is exactly the kind of game I want to create with Unity, and this book is going to show me how!"
Unfortunately, a step-by-step guide in creating a game of the size and scope of FusionFall would likely require its own flatbed truck to transport, and you'd need a few friends to help you turn each enormous page. It would take you the rest of your life to read, and on your deathbed, you'd finally realize the grave error that you had made in ordering it online in the first place, despite having qualified for free shipping.
Here's why: check out the game credits link on the Fusion http://fusionfall.cartoonnetwork.com/game/credits.php.
This page lists all of the people involved in bringing the game to life. Cartoon Network enlisted the help of an experienced Korean MMO developer called Grigon Entertainment. There are over 80 names on that credits list! Clearly, only two courses of action are available to you:
- Build a cloning machine and make 79 copies of yourself. Send each of those copies to school to study various disciplines, including marketing, server programming, and 3D animation. Then spend a year building the game with your clones. Keep track of who's who by using a sophisticated armband system.
- Give up now because you'll never make the game of your dreams.
Another option
Before you do something rash and abandon game development for farming, let's take another look at this. FusionFall is very impressive, and it might look a lot like the game that you've always dreamed of making. This book is not about crushing your dreams. It's about dialing down your expectations, putting those dreams in an airtight jar, and taking baby steps. Confucius said: "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." I don't know much about the man's hobbies, but if he was into video games, he might have said something similar about them—creating a game with a thousand awesome features begins by creating a single, less feature-rich game.
So, let's put the FusionFall dream in an airtight jar and come back to it when we're ready. We'll take a look at some smaller Unity 3D game examples and talk about what it took to build them.
Off-Road Velociraptor Safari
No tour of Unity 3D games would be complete without a trip to Blurst.com—the game portal owned and operated by indie game developer Flashbang Studios. In addition to hosting games by other indie game developers, Flashbang has packed Blurst with its own slate of kooky content, including Off-Road Velociraptor Safari.
In Off-Road Velociraptor Safari, you play a dinosaur in a pith helmet and a monocle driving a jeep equipped with a deadly spiked ball on a chain (just like in the archaeology textbooks). Your goal is to spin around in your jeep doing tricks and murdering your fellow dinosaurs (obviously).
For many indie game developers and reviewers, Off-Road Velociraptor Safari was their first introduction to Unity. Some reviewers said that they were stunned that a fully 3D game could play in the browser. Other reviewers were a little bummed that the game was sluggish on slower computers. We'll talk about optimization a little later, but it's not too early to keep performance in mind as you start out.
Fewer features, more promise
If you play Off-Road Velociraptor Safari and some of the other games on the Blurst site, you'll get a better sense of what you can do with Unity without a team of experienced Korean MMO developers. The game has 3D models, physics (code that controls how things move around somewhat realistically), collisions (code that detects when things hit each other), music, and sound effects. Just like FusionFall, the game can be played in the browser with the Unity Web Player plugin. Flashbang Studios also sells downloadable versions of its games, demonstrating that Unity can produce standalone executable game files too.
Maybe we should build Off-Road Velociraptor Safari?
Right then! We can't create FusionFall just yet, but we can surely create a tiny game like Off-Road Velociraptor Safari, right? Well... no. Again, this book isn't about crushing your game development dreams. But the fact remains that Off-Road Velociraptor Safari took five supremely talented and experienced guys eight weeks to build on full-time hours, and they've been tweaking and improving it ever since. Even a game like this, which may seem quite small in comparison to a full-blown MMO game like FusionFall, is a daunting challenge for a solo developer. Put it in a jar up on the shelf, and let's take a look at something you'll have more success with.
I bent my Wooglie
. But here is where we'll make our start with Unity. This is exactly where you need to begin as a new game developer, or as someone approaching a new piece of technology like Unity.
Play through a selection of games on Wooglie. I'll highlight a few of them for your interest:
Big Fun Racing
Big Fun Racing is a simple but effective game where you zip around collecting coins in a toy truck. It features a number of different levels and unlockable vehicles. The game designer sunk a few months into the game in his off-hours; with a little help from outsource artists to create the vehicle models.
Diceworks
Diceworks is a very simple, well-polished game designed for the iPhone in Unity 3D. We won't be covering any iPhone development, but it's good to know that your Unity content can be deployed to a number of other devices and platforms, including Apple iOS, Android, and the Nintendo Wii. These add-on versions of the software cost an additional fee, but you can deploy your games to the Web, to the Mac, and to your PC for free using the indie version of Unity.
Diceworks was created by one artist and one programmer working together as a team. It's rare to find a single person who possesses both programming and artistic talent simultaneously; scientists say that these disciplines are split between two different lobes in our brains, and we tend to favor one or the other. The artist-programmer pairing that produced Diceworks is a common setup in game development. What's your own brain telling you? Are you more comfy with visuals or logic? Art or programming? Once you discover the answer, it's not a bad plan to find someone to make up the other half of your brain so that your game handles both areas competently.
At any event, with Diceworks we're definitely getting closer to the scope and scale that you can manage on your own as you start out with Unity.
It's also interesting to note that Diceworks is a 2D game created in a 3D engine. The third "D" is largely missing, and all of the game elements appear to exist on a flat plane. Nixing that extra dimension when you're just starting out isn't a half bad idea. Adding depth to your game brings a whole new dimension of difficulty to your designs, and it will be easier to get up and running with Unity by focusing on the X and Y axes, and leaving the Z-axis in one of those dream jars. With a few sturdy working game examples under your belt, it won't be long before you can take that jar with Z axis down off the shelf and pop it open. The games that we'll be building in this book will stick to a two-dimensional plane, using three-dimensional models. Even so, certain games have taken this concept and ran with it. For example, the New Super Mario Bros. Wii locked its 3D characters to a 2D plane and wound up an extremely complex and satisfying platformer.