next »

[DanFornace]

Greetings TIGSource! I am starting up on my senior project at Drexel University. While I pitched a web idea, I ending up being placed in a gaming group without a project, so now we have to come up with an idea in a few weeks that is feasible to do over a 6 month period.

We have a 5 person group with 2 people with programming experience. Right now we are trying to come up with what types of games we can make and what engine we should go for.

We are all Digital Media Majors so none of us have a programming background persay. However, of the 2 with programming experience- I have used Game Maker, Flash and Javascript (HTML) before. You can see my work at www.danfornace.com. The other student has used Unity3D for a previous class but was not in charge of programming. The other 3 will mostly be used for assets, including 3D/2D work and sound.

So our teachers want us to do something gimmicky really. They like to push projects that are multidisciplinary or use new technologies. Since we do not have a Computer Science Major, we are limited in the platforms we can access.

However, our current idea is to design a simple game in Unity3D where 4 players can play simultaneously on their PCs. We would then like to integrate a 5th player who is playing on an iPad and can interact with the 4 gamers. So when a game starts, it has 4 players competing with their small characters and then one player who can see the whole map and spin the world around with tilt controls and lay traps.

Now we are pretty confident in our ability to program such a game using Unity, however the main aspect that such a project hinges on is the possibility and difficulty of getting two different devices to be able to interact in realtime over a dedicated server that our school would provide. It is very important that the interactions feel smooth and relatively lag free as the game would involve many collisions and physics. We also have no experience with online multiplayer and would have to be learn everything.


So my question to you is this - For a group of design-oriented students given a 6-month period, would it be possible to create a game in Unity3D with online interactions involving both a pc and mobile device?


If this is not feasible then we will be changing our idea this week.

Thanks for reading this,
Dan

[WafflePilot]

> So my question to you is this - For a group of design-oriented students given a 6-month period, would it be possible to create a game in > Unity3D with online interactions involving both a pc and mobile device?

It dosen't sound to bad, but it really depends on how much network programming experience the folks in your group have -or- how quickly they can learn things up as well as the complexity of game

 since only one person on the group has used unity before it may be a lot for everyone else to learn up the tools and learn up the amount of network programming needed for a game like you described (there is probably a lot of experimenting you will need to do to get things right .etc)  i dunno .. given that you are asking the question I'd probably say start a different project that you feel more comfortable with

[bateleur]

On the plus side, the "different devices" part is really no problem. The main thing you need to know about the iPhone I expect you've worked out for yourself: it isn't very powerful, so you have to keep the complexity down.

[PlayMeTape]

I made a prototype multiplayer space shooter thingy in Unity 2.6 and it was hell. Since then they have fixed the bugs with the RPC calls so it might be simpler now but it's still a major headache trying to keep all the clients synchronized. Multiplayer requires a special mindset to make sure nothing goes wrong, also don't depend on physics for gameplay.

(ps. I gave up on the project due to all the headache of keeping things in check and the RPC call bug)

[DanFornace]

Thanks for the feedback guys.

Yeah, I am really worried about the multiplayer part going smoothly. I know that we could handle coding such a game without online multiplay and we would do very low poly 3D assets so hopefully the Ipad/Iphone could handle it.

The thing about changing ideas is that we still need a catch or gimmick if we want the idea to be approved. So if not multiplatform then we need something else that makes it more than just a game.

We have also toyed with a simple game where pieces of it are traded between iPhones. Such as an rpg where you share characters.

Any more ideas/suggestions.


@Christoffer

If we do continue with multiplayer in Unity would we be able to contact you about ways to go about starting the engine so we could avoid some of the headaches that you experienced?

[PlayMeTape]

Yeah I could probably answer some simple questions if they pop up. I could also point you to this excellent tutorial I went through before starting my project. It's really quite good since it explores several different ways of setting up multiplayer:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/29015-UniKnowledge-entry-Unity-Networking-the-Zero-to-Hero-guide

Anyways, if you'd still like to reach me just PM me on here since I visit a lot. You should know I wrote all my code in C# but all of the examples in the tutorial are written with javascript.

[PGGB]

AI War was rewritten in Unity so I'd say it's totally possible.