Mobile has become the center of the universe and from the developer's point of view it is fantastic to have a tool that allows to code just once a game for iOS, Android and Web. Having read a lot about it and played some demos we just had to take a closer look. So what follows are our first impressions of the Unity 3 and its development environment from the perspective of Flash developers. From Flash to Unity 3
The workflow with Unity 3 is a lot like developing in Flash, in fact, conceptually there are so many similarities that as a Flash developer it’s very easy to understand the basics. The correspondences between both IDE's are the following: the Unity 3 Project Panel is just like the Library in Flash, the Hierarchy is the layer system found in the Timeline, the Unity GameObject is a bit like the DisplayObject in Flash, while Prefabs can be instantiated at runtime just like linked MovieClips or Sprites. Even though the default scripting language is JavaScript, AS3 developers will feel at home with C#.
After having played for a few hours with this tutorial what quickly becomes apparent, is that besides from the performance advantage that Unity 3 brings to 3D graphics, this is also an engine that was built for making games rather than a platform for everything from 2D vector animations, banners and videos.
Producing a game in Flash, even with a framework as advanced as Flixel, is still a major piece of work. Unity 3 has anything required to develop games: 3D renderer, shaders, particle effects, a physics engine, sound management... All of this means that you can focus on creating the actual game itself, rather than trying to build an engine from scratch or spend a lot of time working out how to combine existing code libraries or frameworks to make a game in Flash.
