If you wan’t to skip through this ever-so enthralling and invigorating read and leave here with something more than you came with, my insight on the subject is going to be a rock-hard “NO!”. But, if you so choose to stick around and hear me out, I’d be more than happy to explain myself.
Over the past year I’ve been pretty heavily involved with Unity3D, which may or may not contribute to my biased opinion. Oh, so you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t the slightest clue as to what the hell I’m talking about? Unity is an awesome, powerful, and free game engine that has been the backbone of some pretty successful projects, including: Dead Trigger 1 & 2, Temple Run 1 & 2, Bad Piggies, and most notably Blizzard’s Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft.
When I say the Unity software is free, I mean that there is a free option which basically just comes with less packages and tool kits than the paid version. If you are in fact interested in the paid version you’ll be happy to know that it’ll only run you a modest $1,500. But, when you’re about to drop that kind of dough on a game engine you’ll have known that you’ve made it as a developer.Wait… stop getting me off track, this is all besides the point!
Recently my friend had asked me that if he wanted to make an app, would it be cheating to use Unity. I couldn’t believe this was an actual thing, so I did some research on how people feel about it which inevitably led me to reading a lot of hubbub on the internet saying that if you’re making games with Unity (or any of the other popular engines) instead of rolling your own engine, you’re cheating. First of all let me say that I wasn’t aware anyone was keeping score.
From a programmer’s point of view, the number one rule of thumb that I keep in my handy dandy magic programmer’s arsenal is that there is ab-so-lutely no use in reinventing the wheel. Why on earth would I spend the hundreds, if not thousands of man hours on rolling my own engine that will be substantially less capable than Unity’s? I wouldn’t and I wont because I THOUGHT THIS WAS AMERICA!
Thank you, Randy.
The people making those outlandish claims are probably 12 year old kids that just kicked my ass in Call of Duty but that’s not what gets to me. What gets to me is that if you’re reading this right now it’s most likely because you literally Google’d “Is using Unity3D Cheating”. There are some passionate people who just want to make video games and they are going to read those posts. The worst case scenario is them being led to believe that the community is going to chase them out of town with pitch forks and fire and stuff if they release a title using a preexisting engine.
Making a game is making a game is making a game. If you can have an idea or a goal, use the tools that you can get you’re hands on to realize said idea/goal, and actually complete the project, you’re better than 98% of the rest of the people that came before you. You don’t need to be some programming wizard, or Picasso to open up Youtube and start learning.
I’ve seen and heard of some pretty marvelous success stories from people that have made successful games/apps without even writing a line of code and if I didn’t love programming so much, I’d have zero shame in taking that route.
Thank you for letting me rant and check back for some more seemingly useless reads.
Jacob K. Taylor 