Why Unity?

It may or may not have been announced yet, but the engine driving the world of Pangenic is Unity3D. If you are a game developer, you are probably familiar with Unity, but if not, there are a couple of cool opportunities this engine affords us that we'd like to share with you.

First, Unity3D is a multi-platform engine. This means that all of our development work can easily be published in several different spaces. We know we have people on PCs, people on Macs, people running Linux boxes, and even people on mobile who would like to experience the unique, Victorian tactical gameplay that Pangenic is going to offer. Unity gives us the best starting position to bring all of that online simultaneously. We'd like to get this title to the entire breadth of our audience -- all of you -- and we are making early decisions to make that a reality as soon as possible.

Secondly, Unity3D is very strong prototyping platform. While building complete features takes time, Unity specializes in allowing us to cobble together feature concepts quickly, test them for fun factor, and then scrap them if they don't meet our bar. Our design methodology is iterative (we try features, see if they succeed, build on them if they do, and drop them if they do not.) Unity lets us iterate quickly, and thus hone our work and our world more quickly.

Unity3D is not without challenges though. Pangenic is essentially a two-dimensional universe, and Unity3D specializes in building three-dimensional worlds. In order to optimize a 2D game in Unity so it runs efficiently on limited devices (such as mobile phones, which may see Pangenic) we have to use some sophisticated middleware and cludge a few native elements of the engine to suit our needs. This challenge is far outweighed by the above advantages.

As we move forward we'll reveal some of our process and how we use Unity to continue to build this exciting world.