BBBen
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Update - Emi, Shizu and Shuji fun time!
🕑 Added 2021-08-22 22:00:05 +0000 UTCtl;dr - I've been trying to learn some basic Unity programming.
This week's image
This one is an image I designed some time ago to test the idea out for the eventual Emi/Shizu scene. This image, as it is here, is not actually going to appear in the game - I have to make some changes to it to update it and I likely won't bother with the split-screen effect because, while it's cool as an individual image, in the game it wouldn't display very well.
I also want to update the models somewhat and, as you'll see when I reveal the scene in full, there's one more element - basically a costuming change - to the scene that I hadn't thought of when I first rendered this image.
I will probably reuse both the parts of it, though, as I like this image in general.
Unity tutorials
For a while now I've been wanting to learn a bit about how to develop a game in Unity. I don't know how well I'll stick with it, but as I have a little window of available time after releasing the build for the month I've been taking several days to work slowly through a beginner tutorial for the engine.
It's been an interesting experience and I'm enjoying it so far. The biggest hassle is that it does rely somewhat on using C# code, which I find challenging and intimidating, but maybe I'll be able to get by without becoming a C# master, since I hopefully won't need that much coding to really implement what I'll be hoping to do with the engine. Even if I never become fantastic at it, expanding my skill set with some Unity literacy will likely help me a lot in the long run.
This isn't for porting PAT or anything like that, by the way. Porting the game would be a huge task that would prevent me from making new content for quite some time and now that the worst bugs in VNM have been resolved I don't think there's any especially profound reason to do so anyway. Not that I was ever considering it - I'm long past the point of no return on working with another engine for PAT and I'm actually pretty good with VNM now, so I'd like to keep taking advantage of my acquired skill there.
The Unity practice is instead for future projects; most of all I'd like to be able to have a good idea of how Lord Goblin works. I'm not currently programming it at all, but ultimately I'll likely have to take on the role of adding content to the game, so it would help if I knew the engine well enough to do that. Hell, if I get good enough maybe I can even eventually take on real gameplay development in the game.
Depending on how well I can stick to this process so far I might end up paying for an online course in learning Unity, since that would be a sensible business investment on my part. The guy I'm following on YouTube right now is really good but also quite expensive, so... well, we'll see where I go on that one. First I've got to see if I can get through the basics and still feel like I'm going to continue.
What do you think of the image so far? Any advice for me in starting to learn Unity? Let me know in the comments below!
Comments
BBBen
Oh, there's tools for that kind of thing available for Unity too. I've got a plugin for Unity called Naninovel, which itself is a powerful VN engine and I already find it a lot easier to use than Ren'py. That's generally the case with really ubiquitous engines like this; they have a million tools available and lots of support. The issue is the initial learning curve, meaning it just takes more time to get proficient in the system (and problems you've seen would likely be due to that), but once you get past that learning curve it offers considerably more options. I'm not certain yet whether I'll ever get there; I just need to be comfortable with the basics at the moment, but I'd like to get better if I can manage it.
Wild Bill
It's not about how many bad games there are, it's about why they are bad. Bad games made in Renpy are bad because they have bad writing or bad art, but the engine is solid. Unity being a general purpose 'engine' you have to create the actual game engine yourself, rather than taking advantage of the countless hours that have gone into the development of something like Renpy. So while Unity games may have better writing and artwork, on a technical engine level they are invariably inferior to something someone threw together in a few hours in Renpy because they lack that foundation. If doing something in 3d or if doing a realtime game like a 2d platformer, Unity is a good fit but for a VN or VN-like sandbox/point-and-click game, Unity is a terrible choice. It's all about using the right tool for the right job.
BBBen
Well, possibly so, but really any accessible engine (Ren'py, RPG Maker, etc.) has a lot of garbage made in it. What I'm really looking for is a platform that's accessible enough for me to use, widely used so it has good support, bug fixes and I can bring on other programmers, decent optimisation options and good export options so I can release in a lot of different possible ways. Unity's tougher to use than VN Maker, for example, but it's better in more or less every other way.
Wild Bill
Those are all major mainstream titles made by professional games studios with corresponding budgets. In the space of adult games made by one person or a small team, every single Unity game I've ever seen falls into one of the two categories I mentioned.
BBBen
It's a very versatile engine used by a million different games, including a lot of pretty big titles, so I wouldn't judge it based on some poor examples. When you get a whole bunch of garbage built in an engine that's usually evidence that the engine is really accessible (cheap and fairly easy to learn) so a bunch of unskilled people try it out in a limited way. At the same time, the engine's been used for stuff like Kerbal Space Program, Hearthstone, Fall Guys, River City Girls, Pokemon Unite and most of the recent top-down cRPGs like Wasteland 3, etc, so it can handle major projects. Certainly it can handle anything at the level I'll be working on.
Wild Bill
I have a pretty dim view of Unity games. They tend to either be VNs delivering pre-rendered graphics which would be much better made in a specialised VN engine like Renpy, or they are 3d games that are basically just tech demos.
