At some point in every young gamer's life, they have aspired to someday create video games. Then as usual life happens and those aspirations give way to other facets of life and are forgotten. As was the case with me until recently. Now having a well-developed understanding of programming and getting "videogame designer" as a 94% career match on my Job1 grant assessment, I've decided to at least explore videogame creation and look into what it takes to make a game. This search eventually led me to the Unity game engine. Highly regarded by my developer friends and the internet alike, let's dive into what makes Unity one of the front runners in game development engines.
What is Unity?
Unity is a game development engine created exclusively for Mac OS X in 2005 by Unity technologies. It is a cross-platform engine that allows for creating simulations in 2D/3D and even AR and VR. One of Unity's biggest pros is its ease of access, not just to be available to low-level devs free of charge but also in its learning curve, allowing even the most novice to dive and start creating. "Create! Create! Create!". That seems to be the mantra whenever looking up tips and tricks for novice game designers, and Unity's tools and interfaces make that much easier. Drag and drop functionality, a component-based hierarchal system of organizing game elements, and the ability to import tons of assets and purchase many more from its extensive app store, no wonder Unity is incredibly popular with indie and mobile developers. As of 2021, 53% of the 1,000 top-selling mobile games run on Unity. Unity is also supported on 25 different platforms, allowing incredibly portability for any games developed on the engine.
Unity versions and features
Let's have a quick run-through of Unity's different versions and the features that came with it. We already know about the original Unity 1.0 that was launched for Mac OS X in 2005. Two years later, Unity 2.0 arrived, and with a plethora of new features optimized 3D terrain rendering, real-time dynamic lighting and video playback, in addition, a Networking Layer that operated over UDP was implemented allowing developers to collaborate more easily and also implement multiplayer on games.
In 2008 support was released for iOS with the release of the iPhone. Here began Unity's domination of the mobile game market because of how quickly they were able to implement iOS support. In 2010, Unity finally released support for Android, desktops, and videogame consoles. Improving its repertoire with features such as Illuminate Labs beast lightmap tool, deferred rendering, UV mapping, a built-in editing tree, native font rendering, and audio filters.
Unity 4.0 that came in 2012 brought with it DirectX 11 and adobe flash support, mecanim animation tools, and Linux preview. Unity 5.0 introduced WebGL support, global illumination, lightmapping, Unity Cloud, NVidia physics engine, 4k 360 videos for VR. And then in 2017, it was decided that the program would no longer be numbered instead the Unity would be followed by the year of said version's release. Unity 2017 came with real-time graphics rendering, color grading, and world-building, live performance analytics, and introduced Timeline, which allowed for drag and drops and a camera system known as Cinemachine. Unity 2018 came with a scriptable render pipeline for high-end graphics. A high-end version for desktops and consoles and a low-end version for mobile and VR. In 2020 Unity introduced Mixed and Augmented Reality Studio (MARS).
Why choose Unity?
There is a lot of reason you should choose Unity as the game engine for your next and/or first project. The aforementioned low learning curve of course, but there are plenty of other reasons. Its unique subscription model is free of cost with the caveat that you have earned less than $100,000 in revenue in the fiscal year. Next up is the business license which comes in at $40/month and after hitting the $200,000/year mark it increases to the pro version at $150/month. Now if you've generated that much revenue with your game a measly $1800/year is but a drop in the bucket. Unity also comes with an extensive asset store with over 56,000 unique assets to choose from, removing the need for asset creation and freeing up more time to implement mechanics. While Unity has plenty of tools for a game dev to use if any of their premade tools just don't cut it, you can also easily create your own tools. And finally, with support for 25 different platforms, deployment is a breeze.
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