I bent my Wooglie
Wooglie.com is a Unity game portal hosted by M2H Game Studio in the Netherlands. One glance at the front page will tell you that it's a far different portal than Blurst.com. Many of the Wooglie games are rough around the edges, and lack the sophistication and slick professional sheen of the games on Blurst. But here is where we'll make our start with Unity. This is exactly where you need to begin as a new game developer, or as someone approaching a new piece of technology like Unity.
Play through a selection of games on Wooglie. I'll highlight a few of them for your interest:
Big Fun Racing
Big Fun Racing is a simple but effective game where you zip around collecting coins in a toy truck. It features a number of different levels and unlockable vehicles. The game designer sunk a few months into the game in his off-hours, with a little help from outsource artists to create the vehicle models.
Diceworks
Diceworks is a very simple, well-polished game designed in Unity 3D for iPhones. We won't be covering any iPhone development, but it's good to know that your Unity content can be deployed to a number of other devices and platforms.
Diceworks was created by one artist and one programmer working together as a team. It's rare to find a single person who possesses both programming and artistic talent simultaneously; scientists say that these disciplines are split between two different lobes in our brains, and we tend to favor one or the other. The artist-programmer pairing that produced Diceworks is a common setup in game development. What's your own brain telling you? Are you more comfy with visuals or logic? Art or programming? Once you discover the answer, it's not a bad plan to find someone to make up the other half of your brain so that your game handles both areas competently.
At any event, with Diceworks we're definitely getting closer to the scope and scale that you can manage on your own as you start out with Unity.
It's also interesting to note that Diceworks is a 2D game created in a 3D engine. The third "D" is largely missing, and all of the game elements appear to exist on a flat plane. Nixing that extra dimension when you're just starting out isn't a half-bad idea. Adding depth to your game brings a whole new dimension of difficulty to your designs, and it will be easier to get up and running with Unity by focusing on the X and Y axes, and leaving the Z-axis in one of those dream jars. With a few sturdy working game examples under your belt, it won't be long before you can take that Z-jar down off the shelf and pop it open. The games that we'll be building in this book will stick to a two-dimensional plane, using three-dimensional models. Even so, certain games have taken this concept and ran with it: New Super Mario Bros. Wii locked its 3D characters to a 2D plane and wound up an extremely complex and satisfying platformer.
Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime
With their game Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, the talented three-person team at the Asteroid Base adds half a "D" to that formula. This is a two-and-a-half-D game, which combines the advantages of a 2D game with all the eye-popping pizzazz of all 3Ds.
Showcase Showdown
Unity portals—game sites that feature Unity-made games—are popping up all over the place. Here are a few more sites to hit in your survey of what Unity can do:
