UNITY: Casual Games as a Business

to my surprise the unity 3d ide runs almost stutter free on my acer aspire one netbook with 1 ghz and 1 gig ram. i've often been thinking about putting hands on some project involving 3d physics, but always ended up in endless pages of mathematical formulas with a visual output far from what a customer would ever pay me for. when one of our heads came up with unity 3d a few days ago, I was pretty sceptical. some easy to handle framework that is supposed to spit out executables for win, mac, android, ios and flash, capable of using ms's kinect as an input device and ready to be used for in the wild interactive installations, just sounds too promising to be true. the screenshots below are what a "html programmer" can come up with after spending his first night with unity 3d and no previous knowledge. i could run the demo in fullscreen mode on an acer aspire netbook, compiled to native executable and to a web version, playable in some unity active x control within a web browser. it's pretty easy to assemble your own demo from bits and pieces of existing projects and web ressources. all the physics and high maths things are wrapped in easy to handle methods and reside hidden away from amateurs like me. still all motion, shading and ai code can be tweaked or exchanged if necessary. http://unity3d.com/support/resources/articles/casual-business when I was younger, I was told that you do that kind of "serious" stuff in c++ and inline assembly. nowadays I get a drag-n-drop (a.k.a klicki-bunti) development environment that can be programmed with the same language you use for webdesign ... huh?! something must be wrong here 8) i'm not 100 % convinced that unity produces output in a quality we're looking for, but it looks pretty nice so far. an essay on the unity website with the promising title "Casual Games as a Business" could be an inspiration for 2012: