Introduction to Unity

Licensing options

Unity offers several pricing tiers, including personal, plus, and pro. The free version will help you if you are getting started. You can upgrade to plus or pro later if you are serious about making commercial games. If you work for an enterprise with gross annual revenue of more than USD100,000 in the previous fiscal year, you only have to pay the licensing fees.

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Advantages of Unity

Unity is a good engine for beginners

Unity being free of charge makes for a unique tool for students and aspiring developers. If you are an amateur in programming and want to get something done, Unity is an excellent place to start. It's good for you when you need to do heavy-level designing because you have most of the tools there. Unity's ease of use for novices went a step further when the firm announced in July 2020 that Bolt, a visual scripting tool, was included at no extra cost. Bolt helps developers implement logic in their projects without knowing how to code.

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Unity is fast and agile

Unity's ability to get things done fast is another advantage. It can be constructive when you want to brainstorm for a new game concept. It also allows very fast iteration. According to Stan Loiseaux, artist and co-founder at Pajama Llama, developer of Flotsam -- awarded the Best Unity Game prize at Gamescom 2019, his primary purpose for choosing Unity was its ability to make a game pretty quickly, without even coding or with effortless coding.

Unity makes portability easier

For a company focusing on multiplatform games, Unity can provide the ease at which games can be deployed and iterated on more than 25 platforms. It is also fast at porting, with your game being practically ready to go on all the distinct platforms in one click. 

Unity's broader reach makes recruitment easier

Many individuals are familiar with Unity, which makes it helpful if you ever need contractors. As so many people now use it, the barrier to hiring someone who knows how to use it is substantially lower, which is extremely useful if you need to get things done fast and cheaply. The engine is utilized at many different levels of education, which makes the hiring process relatively simple.

Unity has an extensive and varied asset store

It provides its user with well-written and updated documentation and a well-stocked asset Store for additional tools. It is supported by a great dev community to help figure things out. All these features make Unity the first option available among other game engines. 

Unity allows you to build your tools

Unity's Asset Store makes it effortless for developers to buy tools, but the engine also makes it easy to build tools. This is useful in making games because it helps to cut down on time on building hard kinds of stuff.

Disadvantages of Unity

Unity is not suitable for big projects

It may not be suitable if you aim to do a large landscape with lots of things on the screen at once, a AAA game or a networked game. Not being able to dive too deep is both a strength and a weakness for Unity. On the one hand, it allows for a quick process, well adapted to novices. On the other hand, it does not allow any heavy optimizations or allows to do a lot of fancy tricks.

Unity promotes bad code practices

Unity was not necessarily meant to become a game engine; it was initially meant for web development and JavaScript. It promotes bad code practices as it was meant for smaller projects. 

It was written to write a few small behaviors and build something dynamic. However, long code can make it difficult to separate data from code, so everything starts to be intertwined. Therefore it is not good in the long term. 

Unity is not artist-friendly

With Unity, you need to put more effort into lighting and shaders, as it does not provide you with many options to make things real and close to reality.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is Unity?

Unity is a cross-platform gaming engine created by Unity Technologies, first announced and released in 2005 June at Apple Inc.'s Worldwide Developers Conference as a Mac OS X-exclusive game engine.

What is a game engine?

A game engine is a software framework mainly designed to develop video games, and generally includes relevant libraries and support programs.

What can the Unity game engine do?

The engine can create three-dimensional (3D), two-dimensional (2D) games and other interactive simulations. The engine has been used by industries outside video gaming, such as architecture, engineering, film, automotive, construction, and the United States Armed Forces.

Name some top competitors of this game engine.

Unity Technologies's top competitors include MathWorks, Oculus, Roblox, Aarki, Chartboost, GameSalad, and Mobvista.

Can we sell games and make money with the free version of Unity? 

Yes, you can create and sell a game with the free version of Unity without paying royalties or any revenue share.

Conclusion

We hope this article provided insights into the Unity gaming engine, its advantages, features and disadvantages, and licensing options.

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