Today, let’s talk about the tools that the team uses in the development of Twelve Floors. We mainly use two pieces of software — Unity Game Engine and Adobe Photoshop. I am confident that most of you reading this knows what Photoshop is, but not many know about Unity. Let’s break it down today.
What specifically is a game engine? Simply put, a game engine is a game development software tool that enables developers to put together a video game. Game engines usually provide many useful facilities such as graphics, sound, physics and even AI systems to glue everything together, resulting in a world inhabited by tiny creatures in your mind.
For example, in Unity, there is already a pre-built physics system where any game object with the Rigidbody component has a mass and its corresponding dynamics(think gravity and linear drag etc.). Things can get pretty complex if you decide to override the physics system and build from the ground up, but it is because Unity offers this level of simplicity right out of the box that many prefer Unity over other engines.
The two most popular game engines are Unity and Unreal Engine. When choosing which game engine to go for, developers usually visualize what the end result will look like and go for the engine that has the best capability to achieve that result. The differences are usually quality in graphics and the simplicity of usage, with Unreal crushing Unity in graphics. For Twelve Floors, because Unity is super beginner-friendly(mind you, it gets complex right after that stage) compared to Unreal Engine, we opted for Unity and have stuck with it for the past 8 months. Plus, it’s a 2D game we’re making.
While we have talked internally about making a 3D game in the future and switching to Unreal Engine would be inevitable if so, we are determined to stick with Unity before anything happens.
So…if there was a 3D version of Twelve Floors, what would be the one thing that you want to see? 👀
