Over the past few weeks my team and I have been working on developing a prototype for our game project. I am hesitant to even call it a prototype because it is far from being a functional game. In fact, we weren’t even working on the same code! We decided to use this opportunity as a spike, to generate some answers to questions that should be figured out before we move into full development.
We each started developing on different versions of Unity because we wanted to evaluate the support and difficulty involved in integrating VR into a Unity project. What we have found so far, is that there is not a lot of difference in the work involved, but the newest version of Unity does seem to have more support than other versions.
For most of our team, this is the first time we have used Unity. I can’t speak for anyone else, but it is definitely the first time I have used C#. I knew it would be a bit of an uphill battle to get over the learning curve, and I am sure I am still not over it yet, but the development so far has been okay. I have run into many instances of silly mistakes on my part, such as changing the name of a variable in one place, but not everywhere, causing my code to fail.
I spent hours trying to figure out what was wrong, assuming there was something wrong with my approach, or some setting in Unity was not configured correctly. I had assumed that my code was definitely not the problem, but you know what they say about assuming things.
So, ultimately, using Unity has been very time consuming for very little payoff, but most of that is my own fault. I was an odd mixture of intimidated by the new tool and over-confident in my own programming skills. So I searched for the solutions in all the wrong places when it really was the need to go back to basics.
Ultimately, I like Unity. I see that it can make certain portions of the project very easy to implement and I am excited for the work to be done in this next term.
