Over the past week I have been focusing the development of Gym Empire into getting the basic systems up and running in Unity. I expected this to take a bit of effort but I didn’t realise that each individual step would feel like such a challenge. The issue is one of two halves.
To start with Unity is a vastly different game engine to GameMaker Studio. I was aware of a lot of the differences and was prepared to hit a more steep learning curve in the early stages of developing Gym Empire. However I didn’t anticipate the biggest hurdle. That is re-understanding the game design process in Unity compared to GameMaker. In GameMaker things are quite simply laid out in the fact of what an interactive object is and how that is controlled through the code. To affect a specific object there needs to either be code in that object, code in a different object that references the specific object or a script that is called. In Unity it’s not technically that different, however it provides a much more in depth method as it primarily deals with 3D. I assumed that Unity being more code focused would mean I would find it quite familiar. It turns out not to be the case, as although the code itself is familiar, the new types in the form of GameObjects etc and the way the code interacts with them is new to me. So that means there is a certain amount of learning I need to do in order to reprogram my brain to think in the Unity way.
The other half of the issue is that I want to create a more modular design. One which uses more of the object oriented ideas of reusability. Unity in its nature leans towards a more coupled design style. That’s fine for knocking something up quickly, but as a game becomes more complicated this can make it really hard to manage. For that reason I’m going for a Model/View/Controller pattern, whereby the data is defined separate of the UI and controlling of the game, enabling a form of abstraction between the three. This essentially means I’m “playing Unity in hard mode”, but it will be worth it though. In the end I will have a much more manageable game design and a much deeper understanding of Unity.
So in terms of actual effort, over the past week I’ve been working out how to make new clients turn up at the gym and how to purchase new equipment from a store and place it in the gym. I’m at the point now of understanding how to place the equipment in a nice snap to grid method as is familiar in sim/tycoon/management games. This has given a lot of opportunity to learn Unity concepts new to me and I am already a lot more confident clicking around Unity without guidance than I was this time last week. The immediate next step will be getting the training system up and running by making the clients go and use equipment.