Unity as a Prototyping Tool

During the initial design phase of our game, we ended up with many questions about how over-scoped certain features were and if those features were to be kept, how to implement them. We also needed a better way of presenting our ideas than text and hastily created drawings to demonstrate how our game would actually function - both for outsiders looking to critique our ideas, and to give ourselves a common focus for how the end game would look and play. At this point, prototyping became our number one focus.

We wanted a prototype that would allow us to explore spaceflight mechanics, so 3D capability was a must. This ruled out simple paper prototyping, as well as ActionScript3/Flash(no one on our team is experienced with the 3D Molehill API, so that wasn't a time-friendly option). We also wanted a way to keep some of our prototyping code for insertion into the final product, with or without some minor language translation. At this point we became torn on whether to go ahead and start restructuring our engine from a previous quarter's class to use for the prototype, or use Unity as a prototyping tool. The former option could prove more time consuming and fall short of giving a good look and feel for how we wanted our end game to look like, but the capability for code reuse is very high. The latter option allows for fast prototyping with an easy way to express end look and feel using Unity's built in shaders, but no one on the team had much experience in using Unity.

We ended up taking a hybrid approach: two of us chose to prototype the main gameplay mechanics using the existing 3D engine architecture while one of us (me) recreated the parts of the game that would most benefit from a look and feel demonstration and/or fast iteration of feature designs. This includes portrayal of ships using primitive geometric shapes with glowy textures on them (cubes mostly), weapon control schemes, weapon visual styles, and interface design for both the drone and mothership views. There is also experimentation with positional awareness within a 3D space void (what backgrounds to use, having a particle field to give a sense of movement, planet placement, etc...), and iterative experimentation with ship upgrade schemes.

Flying within the starfield - the player is the blue ship, enemies are yellow ships. The orange trails are gunshots from enemy ships. Minimap textures taken from Starcraft II and Heroes of Newarth.

Flying over a mothership - orange cubes are hard points that are especially vulnerable to enemy attack.

From my experience with Unity so far, I can definitely say that this is a fantastic tool for the entire development process, from prototyping to final product. Even without any prior experience with Unity and after being away from C# for several months, it took very little time to get an environment up and running. The documentation and community are fairly good resources for learning how to do things, and the entire system has a very intuitive feel to it. There are two main problems I've run into that may detract from its usefulness as a full blown development tool: 1. External version control is a pain (though I hear this is going to be fixed in an upcoming patch) and 2. The GUI capabilities are rather limited (for example, not being able to simply rotate a screen aligned texture).

Shooting basic lasers using the mouse to aim.

For our particular group, creating two nearly mirrored copies of our game in two different environments is a waste of time and unfortunately, most of the scripted code from Unity cannot be easily moved into our existing engine without a fair amount of tweaking either. However, the Unity project remains an excellent tool for playing with visual effects and control schemes. I plan on reverting to working on our C++ engine full time within a few weeks after the initial look and feel prototyping is mostly complete, but will be keeping the Unity project for quickly playing with design ideas as they come about throughout the development process.

Next steps: more prototyping and playtesting, some code refactoring of our engine from a previous class, and  hopefully a clearer vision of how to implement game features.