Lessons From Making My First Videogame — Part II

This is the second part of a three part series where we are sharing learnings from developing our first indie game. Click here for the first part.

~ 2D vs 3D ~

In many ways this is not primarily a technical consideration. The art team will usually decide whether the game will be constructed in 3D space vs 2D space. Here are some technical and non-technical things we considered as a small team:

Working in 2D is not easy. If you are making a game that you want to sell, you will expect a reasonable level of polish. Creating a polished 2D game requires:

1. Serious art direction;
2. Artists who understand what it takes to create an interactive 2D space;
3. Programmers who can support this workflow and quite often professional animators;
4. 3D by its very nature has a much larger workflow — with the additional burden of dealing with 3D assets, and the whole workflow in creating and animating these assets. 3D can therefore be quite expensive because the skillets required to model, texture, rig and animate do not come cheap;
5. We did not have a big budget, our team was small and yet we decided to go the 3D route. The most important reason was that we wanted to leverage the capabilities of the engine to produce aesthetics. Unity in 3D mode has some amazing environmental and volumetric effects. We wanted to leverage the lighting, shadows, light-baking, volumetric fog, wind, rain, skies etc. to create our atmosphere

In a 2D game the engine recedes from the forefront in many ways and an experienced artistic team creates a small detailed sandbox. In a 3D game, you have the option to push Unity’s ability to create a compelling atmosphere, sometimes with minimal assets. We depended heavily on assets bought from the Unity asset store (which is an amazing space with incredible assets). We combined these with bespoke assets that we modelled, textured and animated.

Finally, we pushed this hybrid set of assets through scenes featuring detailed lighting and environmental design that we could produce with tools within Unity and a few others that we purchased. Surprisingly, being a small team actually pushed us towards a more detailed and intensive workflow. This delayed the process significantly but allowed to get closer to our vision than 2D could have for our team.

This is specific to our team. You may have amazing artists in your team who understand the process of creating spaces with 2D art. In such cases, 2D can be quick and rewarding. Additionally it is important to remember that 3D programming can seem far more complex for beginners than 2D programming. You are expected to understand, at least high school (sometimes undergrad) mathematics if you take upon a 3D programming challenge.

Programming a polished 3D game in Unity would require you to be fairly good at trigonometry, vector arithmetic and calculus. You can get away with little mathematics knowledge if you are making a 2D game though understanding trigonometry and vector math will help a great deal anyway.