Posted 05 June 2011 - 12:43 PM
Pros of learning Unity3D:
- It's an excellent, well-designed, and flexible engine that does great 3D action games.
- It doesn't try to be a "drag-and-drop" affair: you still have all the power of C# code at your disposal.
- It's very well supported.
- It's being used across the game industry, for both development and prototyping.
- It works on most major platforms: PC (for free!), consoles, mobile, all at a reasonable price.
- If you want to build games, I strongly suggest Unity. I use it almost exclusively for prototyping, and a few times for production.
Cons of learning Unity3D:
- It's not great at 2D. You can do 2D, but it's harder than it needs to be.
- Asset management isn't perfect: if you work with a large (15+ person team) with Unity it will show some weaknesses when trying to merge everyone's stuff. Note that this is knowledge from version 2.6, it may have improved since then.
- If you want to specialize in the technical implementation of games (like graphics or physics coding), Unity already does that stuff for you. I consider this a plus (because I don't believe game developers should be spending their time writing shit that has already been written 10,000 times before) but some people consider that a negative because they want to learn how to reinvent the wheel.
My recommendation: "Is it worth taking the time to learn 'X'?" Yes, no matter what X is, if you have the time. Learning and trying new things is good. Spend a couple hours on Unity and if it interests you, keep going. If it doesn't interest you, think about why and find something that doesn't have that issue. A while back there was a guy who had a massive thread on this very thing: he probably spent 5+ hours reading and responding in that thread. At the end, I told him "you could have gone through the tutorial on how to build a 3D platformer in Unity in the time it took you to decide whether or not you wanted to try it". The moral of the story is don't overthink it, a few hours of hands-on time will answer more of your questions than any forum thread can.
----------------If all else fails, copy Zynga!----------------
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) and assumed it was something that I shouldn't bother with as I should just focus on programming. However, I saw other people using it (eg, Garry Newmand and the people behind Desktop Dunguons) and am now reconsidering...
