Not sure if this is the right section to post this but anyways.

A few of my college grad friends and i want to start development of a game for the new ouya system coming out next year. We have chosen to go with unity as it seems to be one of the best 3d engines for the android platform.

Now my question is, for a 3d first person puzzle game involving some physics, would having unity pro really be worth it? Or is basic good enough? Just wondering, for kickstarter purposes, due to the massive price difference for unity basic+android (400$) vs unity pro+android pro(3000$).

Also we dont have an ouya dev kit yet and will get it after console release. Will we be able to make the game as if for an android phone and just swap over the controls once we have an ouya? Never done anything without having the sdk before.

Thanks for any and all help/advice. Its very appreciated.

Ah alright. I just wanted to make sure there wasnt anything lacking in basic that would hinder us from making game features and stuff. I personally dont have much exp working with game engines so that comparison list did me no good lol. This is all of our first times trying to make a more legit game than like 2-3 week school projects.

Unity3D Basic has one major flaw, no shadows.

You can't really expect anyone to enjoy developing something without shadows, it's like missing half of the 3D.
Of course that's not such a big of a deal if you're developing for mobile devices or even something that's not exactly 3D.

And of course you can render the shadows directly into the textures while creating the models, but I simply can not work in a 3D environment without shadows.

Build in Unity basic until you hit a limit, then look at options regarding pro.

In my experience basic will do 99% of what you want.

Missing features are:
-Rendertextures (which are probably in most cases too heavy for regular mobile use)
-Ability to Load scenes asynchronously (this mostly means you have to live with "waiting to load" screens between scenes
-Splash screen- you have to live with Unity's
-Shadows. (Which will only work on mobile from Unity 4 anyway).
-Profiling.

IMHO, Profiling is the hardest thing to live without, but you can always go old school and Debug.Log, do breakpoints for debugging, and time stuff yourself.

Oh, and it's not a better renderer on pro - it's the same one. They just disable certain low level features like rendertextures, raw GL access (opening that up in Unity 4), being able to add reverb to sound, that sort of thing. The sort of stuff you're mostly only going to need if you're a pro, looking to implement special features.

Good luck with it.
Mike
@runonthespot

Right now I would play with unity basic on PC not android. Reason being that your spending $400 on the license without one crucial piece of information, will unity play nicely with the ouya.

Unity are actually a launch partner for Ouya, a bigger risk is whether Ouya makes it or not and that looks okay at the moment.

http://ouyagamer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/what-developers-have-said-about-ouya.html

Mike
@runonthespot