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To me game play is King. If it is fun to play with solid color rectangles then it will be fun to play with nice graphics. If it is not fun to play with solid color rectangles then it will not be fun to play with awesome graphics either. Just my view on it.
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I certainly agree. I try to do the same, but sometimes is not quite possible for me. I usually start coding from some layout hand draw sketches.
The proportion objects take on screen, huds, etc are amongst the primary mockups I usually do. I try to use those mockups first.
But then, one thing that keeps my enthusiasm/motivation on the game, is the fine tunning of this mockup.
Gfx changes a lot during game dev, but I still find it easier to code the game with all the gfx defined, even if it is at least on its final size.
On the other hand...this is the exact same reason some of my games take ages to finish.
That is another thing I don't care for with Unity. It is a very powerful dev kit but I think most of the developers are way too focused on shiny graphics beyond all else.
When I tried Unity, I was happy that it could import my whole lightwave3d scene and object with a single click and in seconds I could be going about my scene as in an FPS. Digging deeper, I found that Unity has a very own way of doing stuff, and that using the program I would be stuck with its ways and such would not apply to other code programs but to itself. The drag and drop things apart, anything deeper requires a form of script, and if I´m coding something, then I better code it all. Also, the price is simply prohibitive to me.
Yep, the drag/drop thing in Unity makes it really easy to import art from other packages, which makes life a lot easier for artists to pull out something pretty, but then, it is just the usual Unity standard ´game´ with pretty gfx and poor gameplay, which we get to see a lot all around. Some people in press even state that those games are getting like a ´Flash´ style stamp, like "oh, just another Unity style game".
So market gets saturated with those, but that dosen´t mean Unity is not a competent tool, I own Running with Rifles from the very beginning and it is a marvelous Cannon Fodder knock off, really fun stuff with a very stylish gfx.
