"Unity 3D" Makes Indie Game Development Easier

A friend of mine recently showed me this amazing program called Unity 3D, it's basically an IDE for making 3D games with minimal coding. Said friend showed me the program because he works for a real game developer that makes real publisher-backed console games and they're considering switching their development process over to Unity. It's actually a pretty amazing program and worth looking into for any aspiring indie game developers reading this--if you can get past the tighten-the-graphics-on-level-3 feel.

So how does it work? How much does it cost? Can games developed with Unity actually get published? Good questions! Games developed on Unity can be published--many top selling iPhone games are made with Unity and there's at least one example of a published Wii game that was made with Unity. The biggest Unity-developed game is probably Cartoon Network's MMORPG, Fusion Fall. You can see a more complete list of games made with Unity here.

How much does it cost? Would you believe that it's kind of free? You can download the basic version of Unity for free, but Unity Pro, Unity iPhone, and Unity Wii all cost significant amounts of money. Also, if your game is sold for a profit, Unity gets a cut (Edit: Unity has different licensing tiers for different types of companies and platforms, but they don't take a percentage based on profits). But business is business--if you're an artist intending to give your game away for free, Unity is your oyster. Plus, it'd probably be a good idea to get comfortable with using the free version before deciding to shell out hundreds of dollars on the licensed versions.

So how does it work, exactly? I've only just started poking around the program myself, but the Unity website has some pretty impressive video tutorials showing off what it can do. Unity lets you easily jump in and out of Photoshop and Maya 3D to edit textures and 3D models and has built-in wizards for creating lighting, particle effects and hit detection. You can use C and even Javascript for scripting more complicated gameplay functions.

Unity 3D runs natively on both OS X and Windows. You can download it for free right here and start building stuff with it right away. And my mom said I'd never get ANYWHERE with these games!