Student Project III - Post Mortem and More

My third game project at the Games Academy is finished and I did do some coding in C# in Unity.

I created a manager file each for audio clips and particles which provided the public variables used inside the Unity editor and the static files or functions to use in other script files throughout the project. Before the project my experience with C# was nearly non existent, I did some work with C++ or Java before, so the syntax was familiar but my feeling about .NET were kind of mixed. But after working for the project and some work in class in connection with XNA, I kind of liked the ease of work with it.

It was my second project in Unity and this time around it was much more fun to work with. Unity is a great tool kit and gives developers much freedom with their projects. A year ago, my skills as a coder or general developer were not good enough to master Unity but having worked with some coders with more experience than me helped me a lot to understand the ease of work and the freedom Unity offers.

In my free time I converted an old program of mine to C#. As a result I also tried out some WPF interfaces and was surprised by the capabilities it offers.

I am looking forward to my future projects and what might also come by...

By the way, look up Hadron on Facebook. It's the project I worked on :)

2D Engines or 3D Engines for 2D Projects

After spending some time with the development of a 2D game for PC or maybe other platforms I had time to test out some engines that we have access to for free at home or with student licences in school.

For rapid prototyping the Game Maker is the first choice but it has problems with complex mechanics and collusion detection.

Working with Sprites and only 2D objects makes the use of an engine like Unity3D or even the UDK more tedious than helpful because these engines are designed for 3D gameplay and 3D meshes. To tell them otherwise via code is a lot of work and the result is not always desirable. 2.5D on the other hand is more easy to accomplish because the engine already knows how to handle 3D meshes and the "2D gameplay" is possible with some camera tricks.

Using an 2D engine like Torque2D is the better choice for Sprites, 2D objects and 2D gameplay. I am just starting to work with it so I will hold my praises for the moment, maybe it is easy, maybe not...

As for scripting languages most engines today use some kind of c++ related syntax and operators so the switch between different engines is not so difficult, in some cases the code is even transferable between them if not too much engine specific code is being used.