Ascension Games

One of the great things about being an indy developer, which also happens to be one of the harder things about being indy as well, is that you’re able to be agile. What does that mean though? For us, it means that we can shift development on the fly. One day we’ll be working on a game that would take a studio our size a decade to develop, and the next day we’ll be working on tic-tac-toe. Agile for us means that we can take measured risks, and further minimize those risks with smart decisions.

When it comes to being an indy, you sorta have to adopt a survival mentality. I mean you have to get into the headspace of Bear Grylls. You’ve seen his show? This dude is nuts. He jumps into artic pools naked to show you how to get out alive. Yea, bat shit crazy. But thats the mind-set. “I’m gonna do this, and its gonna suck, but the payoff is i get to keep doing this”. Not his words. Mine. I’ve seen this guy do what is needed to do to survive, and most of the time, he says “You’ve got to make the decision to survive…” So for food in Zambia, he splits open a fallen tree, and pulls out a worm bigger than your moms index finger, and proceeds to chew it back like it was gut spaghetti.  So what did we do? Nothing as entertaining as Bear, but we did something that I consider fairly gutsy.

We looked at our development pipeline recently, and when youre indy, you have to take stock often, as supplies are limited, and the road treacherous. Hell, theres not even a road sometimes. But anyhow, we took stock of where we were, and how we were progressing to those goals. One thing I’ve learned after doing this for a while, is that Indy Development can be expensive. I mean , TIme vs Money expensive. Either way, youre gonna end up spending alot of one or the other so the thing you gotta do is ante-up.

We have been investing in our art department for a while, purchasing zbrush, 3ds max, and photoshop so that our artists can produce the work we know they’re capable of, and now the time came to do the same for the development side of the house. So taking stock, we began looking for tools that would save us a year or two of development, that tool soon became obvious. Enter: Unity.

We’ve looked at engines upon engines upon SDK, on top of engines, and unity stands heads and shoulders above them all. Let me share why, and its not rocket science. Unity supports just about every binary art file type in its native , or damn near native format. Maya, Max, Blender formats are all supported. No exporters.

We’ve used lots of engines in the past, and only one other engine even comes close to this pipeline, and it was several hundred thousand to use. Unity isn’t cheap, but it doesn’t break the bank. The catch? We had to switch to Mac to do it.

For me, I love macs. I develop on the Mac. I do most of my art out of Parallels + Windows. Now the rest of my team?  The developers use Visual Studio. Write code in C# (thats C Sharp I’ve come to learn.) They can use Visual Studio in a virtual machine. They’re right at home. Turns out that the biggest obstacle for using Unity for us, was just coming up with money to purchase new macs.

Which we did, and haven’t looked back. Its taken a mainly mac software developer to get this right. In a sea of game engines all looking to make the sprint as short as possible , Unity is one of the only products that gets the hell out of the artists way, and lets creativity happen. One of the features I love about Unity is that I can even get into writing scripts. I wrote a bit of code for a prototype in an afternoon with their documentation and tutorials.

You get alot for free with Unity.  What I mean is that you can stop having your coders build a world editor, and have them focus on gameplay development.

As it happens, Unity is being developed for windows now too.  Theres abosolutely no reason for you to not start using Unity when that happens. Go check it out. Coming up soon, I’ll be interviewing our lead developer on why he likes or dislikes Unity, how he’s adjusting to his new Mac, and quality of life working in both. Stay tuned.

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