Our tech tools
Hi!
I guess it’s about time to start talking about the tech we use for Shadow Bug. This is going to be a bit technical, but hopefully not too much 🙂
We are making Shadow Bug with Unity. For a small indie team developing mobile games Unity is a great engine. It has really good support for mobile platforms and it helps make the workflow fast. For us it was a natural choice, since we’ve all used the engine before.
I really love Unity. In addition to getting an engine with physics and all that, you get an easy to use editor. And the editor is really flexible too! The part I love the most is that making your own menus with custom tools is pretty easy. So if there’s something the editor doesn’t have for me, I can make it myself. I guess the editor tools deserve a blog post of their own.
A Shadow Bug level with debug visualizations in Unity.
So even though I’m a bit of a Unity fan boy, it isn’t perfect. The biggest problem we keep having is updating to new versions of Unity. New versions almost always cause something in Shadow Bug break and sometimes it’s so bad that we have to skip the update altogether. Unity 5 is out of the question for us, since for some reason it completely breaks our animations, and fixing those would take too much time.
We first decided to stick with the version of Unity we started with, but this week we had to update to a newer one. This is because it turned out that since February Apple has demanded all new apps entering the Appstore to have 64-bit support. And the Unity version we started with didn’t have that. This of course caused new bugs, but fortunately we just got them fixed. Still, I’m really hoping we won’t have to update again.
We do most of our tech ourselves, in C#. We use middleware for sounds (Fabric) and I’m currently testing different solutions for analytics and leaderboards. It looks like we will try out Unity Analytics beta for collecting most of our data. And Game Center for the leaderboards. I can’t say much about the pros and cons in these, since I haven’t used them for that long. And I really have nothing to compare them to 🙂
I think this covers our tech pretty well. I’ll leave you with a screen shot of my test project for trying out leaderboards and analytics – Space Pug.
