Unity

My senior project is creating a site for users to create and play custom board games. Due to the game aspect, we decided to use the game engine Unity for the building process. Starting out, I was really excited about the opportunity to learn this game engine. I had already installed it and had worked through a few basic tutorials. However, I don’t think anyone was prepared for the huge learning curve included in using Unity.

Version Control

One immediate problem was how to do version control for our project. We ran into trouble with figuring out how to use Unity in a collaborative sense. Due to initial troubles, we now have two version controls happening: one on GitHub and one on Unity Cloud. Overall, this is still a work in progress. Ideally, we would have one set place where we can merge and pull to the project. However, for now, we are making it work.

So Many Options!

Unity has been an exciting endeavor. However, it is a huge endeavor. There are so many different tutorials and methods in which to achieve something. It seems that for every one task, there are a million ways in which to implement it. Though this can be overwhelming and difficult at times, I am getting many ideas and lessons along the way for future projects.

So Many Packages!

Along the same lines as options, are the packages! In an attempt to make Unity easy and accessible to people who don’t know how to code, Unity has a lot of built-in packages and assets that one can install. While this is great in theory, I actually find it more confusing than if it were all easily codable.

Timeline

The biggest pitfall with using Unity is the fact that we are all learning this huge game engine while also developing the project. This fact makes the whole process feel a lot slower, with many setbacks. I think if we could start again, I would have wanted to either be very familiar with Unity already or vote to use an HTML5 engine like Photon instead.

Hindsight but No Regrets

All that said, I am still excited about being able to learn Unity and build this project. While there could have been easier ways to go about the development, I get to learn this amazing game engine which gives me more opportunities in the future to create my own games as a hobby. And that knowledge makes it all worth it.