If you read my last blog post, way back in September you saw that I wanted to start a new game project. I listed a whole bunch of brain stormed ideas and thoughts about what I wanted to do. Unfortunately I was still working a bit on contracted work so most of my free programming time went to that. Now that my work on that app is winding down, I’ve been spending most of my time collecting and playing games rather than doing research and making prototypes of games.
Today that changes. For this new project, I am going to settle on using Unity3d. I really don’t like this idea very much. For some reason it feels like cheating to me. Even though you are scripting a lot of code, so much is done for you automatically. I guess this is good, and I should just accept it. There are so many benefits to using Unity3d rather than something like cocos2d. A couple are that it’s multi platform so it is easy to port to other systems (Xbox, ps4, iphone, etc). Also, lots of companies are using it so experience may be good in it if I am looking for new work.
The final thing that is swaying my decision is that it was announced this week that a developer’s kit for Nintendo Switch is only going to be 50,000 Yen, or roughly $450. That’s a huge difference in what it cost for WiiU (thousands of dollars). That alone makes me want to learn Unity. It’s always been a dream of mine to program and play a game of my own on a Nintendo system, and this price point actually puts that in my grasp! Nintendo finally is learning something to get more indy developers on board with the Switch!
So where does this leave us? It will probably be a few weeks yet before a Switch dev kit is available. In the meantime I need to come up with a simple idea for a game. I’m thinking I am going to keep it simple so that I can learn the basics Unity3d. More than likely I will publish this to the Apple Store with my other apps. One reason for this is that it is my theory that if you have new apps in the store, your chances are higher to get tickets to WWDC, but we’ll find out. Once I learn the ropes of Unity3d, I’d like to make a new 2d game for the Switch!
Hopefully procrastination doesn’t kick back in!