Starting a game with no fancy assets?It’s the only way! Benefits of prototyping in Unity.

Imagine, you are sitting at home and BOOM, you come up with a brilliant idea for a video game. You know, the once in a lifetime idea.. can’t miss, 1000% success rate type of idea. So, you sit down and begin to make the game.

Now, picture yourself opening up blender and starting to put some work in on making a player character, some assets for backgrounds and some monsters. Have to get the face right, the hair just right, clothing moving just the right way, etc. Fast forward to a week later and you have given up. Failed. You put hours and hours of effort into creating the assets you need before you even started any of the construction of the game. What happens if your idea doesn’t program well? What happens if it isn’t any fun?

Programmers learned this the hard way I’m sure. This is why Unity is so awesome. You can create a player in 2 clicks. Right click, Create 3D Object Cube. Done and done. You have a player. Need an enemy? Don’t spend money on premade Assets or create yourself. Nope, 2 clicks = enemy.

Now you can go ahead and code away. Make the player shoot giant blobs of green goo at the enemy. Doesn’t work well? 2 clicks = sphere and you have a small ball to shoot at the enemy.

In my 2D Space Shooter game I used a cube as the player, a sphere as the enemy and a small red line for the laser. I made the player move and shoot. I made the enemy drop down towards the player. I spent a few days doing this and when I thought, hey, this game looks and plays pretty cool, only then did I start to add real assets. I didn’t waste anytime getting my idea into some code!

I hope this helps you not waste hours of time or dollar bills along your coding journey.

Tomorrow I’m going to start adding more ideas to my game like powerups! I’m thinking a Speed, Shield and Triple Shot. What do you think? Have any ideas for a cool powerup?

Happy Clicking!