Unity 1.5 and shameless plug

[aarku]

It's a bit belated, but Unity 1.5 came out and it's some really hot stuff. Tons of new stuff for a free update. If you checked out Unity before it's worth looking at again. It keeps getting better.

http://unity3d.com/whatsnew-1.5.html

It also is the first press for Big Bang Brain Games... my new project

http://unity3d.com/profiles/Graveck-Interactive.html

Those screenshots are already outdated... but I'm really excited about the project. Really short development time, too.

If you poke around you can find some other testimonials by some iDevGames community members, too. Neil Carter, Kevin Lindeman, Charles Goran, Nicholas Francis, for example.

Cheers,
-Jon

[Najdorf]

I must say, except for gooball, i havent seen any exceptionally good game made in unity yet.

[aarku]

Must have been a typo. yet -> until just recently.

;-)

My wife made a game with Unity. (Her first one ever, too) ;-)

On a more serious note, I think Kevin's progression from his first game (his own engine entered into uDevGames) to his second game (Open Fire) speaks volumes.

As far as myself, what has happened to me and why I don't have a full Unity game out (OverWhelmed Arena was 2 weeks part time) can be summed up into two reasons.

Charles Goran summed the first up nicely in his interview:
I think the biggest challenge for us right now is just keeping the the scope to a manageable level. With Unity, the development time is so fast, it's tempting to just keep adding features!

Papa Pizza Patrol had the scope and polish of a full fledged console title, and the two developers were going to college with multiple jobs each. A whole list of things will probably get cut so we can actually ship it.

The second crappy excuse for why I don't have something big out yet is that I've been doing small jobs with Unity. Did some cool stuff, like motion recognition as input using a camera, and a networked robotics simulator.

I just hope you're not implying there must be something wrong with Unity because there haven't been AAA games shipped using it. (Do you follow the crowd or lead the crowd? :) )

-Jon

[Najdorf]

I just hope you're not implying there must be something wrong with Unity because there haven't been AAA games shipped using it.

Nah, I'm not.

[Achithyn]

There's nothing wrong with Unity. I think for those who wish to publish games at a faster pace / as a hobby, it's perfect. Though, I didn't really like the interface and such. I would rather just make my own stuff without having to use Unity or Torque. That's just my opinion.

~Achi

[igame3d]

Unity has really only been on the market for a year, it takes time for things to really get rolling. There was like nothing cool coming out of Torque for a much longer time. I Simple issues of hobby developers, first time developers, learning curves, and the invetible loss of interest that many new developers experience after hacking away at their first ultimate game idea and hidding more road blocks than inspirational milestones.

I think Unity will have a nice long life, and eventually if it ever fades away and is replaced by something better, it will be fondly remembered the way some of us old timers remember and pine for things like Adventure Construction Kit and Shoot 'Em Up Construction Kit, and BASIC.

I admire the Unity team for what they've accomplished, even though I'm all shades of green with envy and blue with personal regret for them beating me to the punch. I even bought a license, just to support them even though I've no time to use it, crazy me.

[Najdorf]

>I even bought a license, just to support them even though I've no time to use it, crazy me

If you want to sell it half price i'll buy it :)