Unity – A Universal Game Engine For Mobile And Desktop

The game market is massive, and it becomes exponentially bigger each year. The math is simple: more people play games, more games are built by developers from around the world. There are hundreds of big players among game development companies – dozens of enterprises that build big titles, hundreds of startups, thousands of small teams, and freelancers. They use different game engines depending on their goals, technical and visual requirements, target audience, etc. Some of them use in-house developed or modified engines, other use ready-to-use solutions.

There are a variety of engines and frameworks for game development. Engines such as Unreal Engine, Godot, Lumberyard, CryEngine, GameMaker and others.

Unity is also a great option. It is designed to enable developers to produce visually impactful games on mobile or desktop. It’s a one-stop platform for game developers that enables you to design and build games, both 2d and 3d.

Unity provides a unique full-service platform for providing live updates to other collaborators as games are developed. This is facilitated by its proprietary content delivery network and back-end game development platform.

Unity boasts an end-to-end resources for developers to get games on sale in record time. By harnessing Unity’s suite of build tools and content management functions, game developers can benefit from several benefits that are not available in other platforms:

• Quicker time-to-market: Unity allows developers to focus on building games instead of back-end content platforms.
• Speed and reliability: Updates on a game’s development can be posted to remote project collaborators. Quick and powerful delivery is facilitated by Unity’s content development network (CDN).
• Clear, simple pricing: Unity’s pricing model is completely transparent and laid out online. Developers pay for the CDN based on their required volume, with cloud storage included.
• Release management: This enables games to be distributed in buckets, then badged and bucketed through a centralized management dashboard.
• Simple asset management: Unity enables developers to save valuable coding time by providing a simplified asset system. This eliminates the need for in-house systems to be developed and allows more time to develop games.

Unity engine developers positioned their solution from the beginning as a cross-platform source for building games that support several operating systems simultaneously.

It supports almost all mainstream platforms. This includes Apple iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows (desktop and mobile).

The software can also produce new games for consoles such as the PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and PC versions. Developers appreciate this versatility to develop and sell games across the most popular formats.

Unity supports graphic development for both 2d and 3d games. This is useful for developers catering to both audiences to develop new games in one place.

Unity is also ideal for smaller studios without significant capital to invest in game development. This is particularly important for 2d game developers looking for cheaper production. The ability to pay development fees to Unity via game sales is a good financial solution for those smaller developers.

The platform also enables developers to visualize 3d games with animation and film elements.

Unity’s Assets Store of ready-to-use assets is also a key for game developers and is a significant opportunity to decrease development time and costs.

Unity’s huge marketplace features game-ready assets created by other developers and artists that can be bought and used in the game. It is similar to the Unreal Engine Marketplace but much larger.

For some reviewers, the asset store is one of the main differentiators of the Unity platform from its competitors. It offers the ability to download ready-made content for games instantly. Support is also on hand should the developer need assistance with technical questions or Unity features.

Unity users can also benefit from extensive documentation and a user forum to collaborate with other developers. This collaboration space is designed to facilitate discussions within Unity community members to collaborate on any configuration issues or other hot topics.

Its community also features a variety of resources for developers to grow sales and brand awareness. Much of the focus of this is on the personalization and optimization of gamers’ experiences. Cross-platform collaboration and playability on different devices are also a big part of these development resources.

The engine features the ability to optimize games depending on the platforms where a game is released. It allows to support several options of game optimization and use one of them depending on the device where users start a game. A game can be distributed on desktop devices with higher graphics quality and technical features. The same game for mobile devices can work with lower requirements to the visual quality to operate smoothly and support good FPS.

Games for desktop play are generally developed with more powerful graphics because PCs can handle the greater workloads to run them.

Unity also offers game developers the ability to optimize graphics and game codes for optimal user experience on mobile devices. With more users than ever playing games on mobile devices, optimizing games for apps is important for developers’ continued growth.

PROS

Licensing model: Unity’s licensing model lends itself well to small gaming developers. With a free license for an individual or small business use, developers can produce games at no cost for the software usage. Developers using the Unity Pro license then pay royalties to Unity as they sell games. The subscription-based Unity Enterprise plan starts at $200 per month per seat and is billed annually. In this plan, developers keep all the royalties from their games when they start selling them.

Mobile integrations: Because Unity’s process for building mobile applications is cross-platform, this decreases the development time considerably.

Augmented reality: Unity’s AR features a Vuforia plugin.

VR development: The hot topic in gaming is well-supported by Unity in a way that is not always the case with other development platforms.

CONS

Heavy bundle: system files require storage in the build so the final game build will not be rather small. This is also one of the reasons why Unity is not good for web browsers.

What’s not supported: Unity no longer supports games for the Wii or Wii U.

Unity provides a platform for developers to build cross-platform games. It provides massive support from the developers’ community, the marketplace of assets, and the variety of options to create games of any type, visual style, quality, single-player and multiplayer, etc. It is continually developed to enhance user experience and add new features.

If you are defining the game engine for your next title, then Unity is a great choice. It’s universal, has a variety of fast-to-use assets, and supports multiple options and needs. In case you have more questions, feel free to contact us. We will be happy to assist you and provide further details.