Day 4 - Flash and Unity

So yesterday I talked about development costs for a number of indy platforms. I didn't touch on Unity. (To be fair, I didn't touch on unreal, RPG maker and a dozen other game editors out there either. But lets keep focused on Unity for now.)

Unity Games can look like this:



Unity's recent popularity has made it quite the up and coming game engine. Base version is free. It can create games that seem to exceed older unreal engine titles. Whats not to like?

Unity Web games need you to install a Unity Plug in. (similar to flash) There is no plug in for Linux, and unlike flash it doesn't exactly come preinstalled everywhere. You would be astonished who can't / won't install your game if any installing is required. Like anyone in a business environment that doesn't have admin rights. (Which are a lot of people.)

In fact one of the wisest decisions I made when making my final project for VFS is to record a entire game walkthrough on youtube. So you wouldn't need to have unreal installed for people to play it. Smart choice as even the people at BioWare for whom I eventually landed my job admitted they didn't actually get to play the game. But they did watch the walkthrough.

Accessibility is of paramount importance.

So no Unity, for now. The second choice for me is flash. It's relatively cheap, it scales well across platforms, and most importantly it will do everything I need it to.

Though you've likely seen them everywhere. Flash games can look like this: