Remaking the Wheel

So from my experience of making a game in unity i have learned one very important and time tested lesson that i keep failing in is that you often should not try to “remake the wheel”.  There is a large amount of  pre-built content out there that goes for reasonable prices, whether it be art assets or entire game logic packages in unity.  These help you to immediately jump in to the iteration loop of game design instead of trying to build up the foundations of the game from the get-go.   For example , for our game i built the whole walking, crouching, jumping and other general first person mechanics for the game. These where not a challenge and truth be told took less than a weekend to build.  Where i ran into trouble was the whole picking up objects mechanic that you see in most horror – esque survival games.  <a href  = “http://www.tsp.x10host.com/clickdrag/cdrag.html” title=”This” >   is what i was trying to create .  Now there was already a package literally called  the portal gun package then would let me do exactly that i was really hesitant on spending money on it ( it was like 4$).  That 4$ might as well be 0$ for how much of a pain in the neck it was to develop this thing.  On the other hand , it was kind of a lot of fun. It led to a massive delay in developing the prototype( not entirely my fault 🙂 ) but it eventually got finished.

So for all of you unity users out there, How do you feel about using packages like the one i mentioned about ? How do you feel about the tired old statement Don’t Reinvent the wheel?  I gotta tell you i reaaaaaaalllllllly hate this statement because i LOVE reinventing the wheel.  The only problem is it forces you to put about 100x more hours than necessary in making  simple things.  For the individual game , i tried to do that using these tutorials  found here : ( By the way check them out they are quite cool!)

http://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-create-a-custom-2d-physics-engine-the-basics-and-impulse-resolution–gamedev-6331

My personal opinion is in building these engines you get to really OWN the game even more when you complete your final game. Also it really teaches you about the inner workings of how game engines work, a thing i found most valuable.  For those computer science students out there, it is similar to how they made us take Cmpeng 331 where they teach you the ins and outs of making an ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unity ). This is a thing which we would most likely NEVER EVER use but still . I am of the opinion that this line of thinking, where you need a use case or justification for every little thing in life, is awfully limited and removes from the beauty of learning stuff for the sake of learning!  I’m at a cross road on this because i find my self annoyed by phrase “dont remake the Wheel” while at the same time i see why it exist: You save a billiondiy hours and get to work on problems that HAVE NOT BEEN SOLVED YET.  Thoughts?

 

 

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One Response to Remaking the Wheel

  1. atk5102 says:

    My group also used unity for our project, and personally, I thought all of the resources out there were incredibly useful. A lot of the functionalities that I programmed into unity were based off of things that other people have already done. Taking the scripts other people have used, and tweaking them to fit my needs. While I would agree that building up from scratch is a great way to learn how to use the tool, I simply didn’t have the time to dedicate an entire weekend to just tinkering around in unity and making little progress. Because of many of the other classes I was taking, I needed as much time as I could get to finish all other homeworks and projects, and having the vast resources of every else to reference was a huge help. So I will kind of straddle the fence here. If you have the free time to spend tinkering and just messing around in unity, I think that is the way to go, but for me, under such a time crunch, I had to build off of what other people have already done.

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