Is Unity a Bloated Mess?

unity is a bloated mess a fat whale a beast these are some of the catch phrases i've heard thrown around the indie scene recently it's become quite prevalent so i wanted to make this video to try to get to the bottom of what i think is the truth in this situation [Applause] so what is the cause of this perception unity has unity first of all has a lot of features it's a large suite which caters to a variety of workflows and disciplines it throws out a wide net so to entice and offer creatives of various backgrounds and disciplines a chance to enter the game space you know animators artists game designers as well as allowing access to double a and aaa pipelines for larger teams that need those capabilities so it can be used to make anything from you know crappy birds to aaa style games to learn unity in its totality in its entirety is very difficult and for the most part unnecessary unity has been very successful in its attempt at becoming a one-stop shop for all things gamedev related and its rise to dominance as far as i can see has had a direct correlation with the indie game market exploding and becoming saturated you know because the barrier of entry has now become so low that anyone can just download unity hub and you know follow some tutorial press export to pc or whatever and boom you have a game kind of not really but you know you can upload it and you know people won't necessarily buy it but it's it's out there this then leads to competitors like godot entering the space offering more consumer choice which is great you know the new kids on the block but in some ways it then serves as a comparison point to scrutinize unity from in the past couple of years we've seen big changes in unity with the introduction of the new render pipelines which i believe played a big part in this bloated mess perception you see the roll out of these pipelines was not the smoothest you know we have the standard render pipeline the high definition render pipeline or hdr then we have the lw rp lightweight render pipeline which then changed its name to the universal render pipeline there was a lot of general confusion as to what pipeline a particular project needed to be on and to make matters worse the recommended guides on how to upgrade from the standard render pipeline to the new render pipelines were often convoluted and even broke projects and i even tried to upgrade blood and me to the universal render pipeline because i wanted to get you know all the new bells and whistles but you know this process that i followed this step-by-step guide pretty much broke my project and thankfully i had a git repository and i was able to kind of fall back on that but it caused a lot of frustration for me at the time are you serious it's important to remember back that unity did not start at this big point it is now you know it's been a decade of steady updates which have accumulated to this point when i started first playing with unity which was about 10 years ago now i think i first opened unity up there was no 2d system there was no shader graph there was no tile mapping and cinemachine and no unity hub there was no animation mechanism and there wasn't even a shuriken particle system so it was pretty lightweight although some people still called it bloated because at the time a lot of game frameworks were merely like a code editor and maybe like a basic gui for adding certain graphical elements but for the most part a lot of stuff was done directly with code you know so of course anything compared to that is going to feel bloated right and it's these convenience features that unity added that add to this reputation of being a bloated mess because they've added a lot of things um that might be useful for one demographic of creator but less so for another you know one case in point being the animation mechanism you know which i made a big video about how it's not nearly as useful for certain types of games as it's being proposed to be and yet all the tutorials are constantly pushing people down that that tunnel you know so i kind of made that video to show hey like you don't have to be using this and that's where the problem lies right because something exists in unity doesn't mean you need to be using it or you need to learn it let's take the shadow graph as an example it's a interesting tool set for manipulating custom shaders that unity rolled out in more recent versions you see unless you're specifically interested in creating and manipulating custom shaders it's not so relevant for you you don't necessarily have to learn it i for instance have no current interest in doing anything with it because it's not relevant to the project i'm working on for me i believe simply knowing about it and knowing what it's for and its potential and its opportunities is more than enough then if i cross some bridge that requires me to do that i can say okay i know that tool is there i can now learn and adapt it you know even after years now working with unity i'm always learning new things that i didn't know about you know and that's okay in fact i think it's actually pretty cool that there's such a depth that i can always find exciting new features you know it's completely acceptable to just focus on and learn the tools required to allow you to make the game you want to make there's no value in learning french for instance if you're not planning to speak to french people or you know to absorb french media like books or movies it's a mere novelty so learn what you need to learn to continue the game dev journey do not get caught up in the weeds on the side of the path and often the people parroting these phrases about unity being a bloated beast have barely learned the basics or are still in that very early point of the steep learning curve and through their frustration they then point the blame at the engine to explain their difficulty in learning it and some of the people that i've seen say this are not even unity users they come from competing frameworks you know like doe or game maker and are simply playing some kind of you know tribal warfare games between the communities it's no secret that i'm a fan of unity i like it a lot but i'm also largely agnostic to me it's just a tool in the end you know and i use the best tool for the job yes it takes a lot of time and investment to learn these tools so we want to hope that they stay popular and successful and relevant for some time into the future every single framework or software or product has a life cycle you know some longer than others but in the tech world with frameworks you know i was fortunate and unfortunate enough to have worked through the collapse of the flash and as3 markets which with it pulled into the abyss popular game making frameworks like starling and adobe air those events they taught me the valuable lesson of diversifying you do not want to be the one left holding the basket of broken eggs so keep that in mind and try to diversify your skills and just general perception of you know other frameworks and and whatever don't get caught in these uh framework politics or whatever it is unity has become the gateway into the gamedev market for many people and as such many users don't have a comparison point of the past and how difficult it was to do basically anything you know for years i was stuck with frameworks and languages where it was difficult to do even the most trivial technical things and you would expend all your creative energy trying to solve these tedious technical things you know things that come out of the box in unity now that we take for granted things like physics you think the physics in unity are buggy try to write your own and we'll we'll see how buggy your physics are so if unity wasn't around the doors to the market would have probably remained closed for a large group of people because coding skills were almost always a prerequisite into doing this kind of game dev stuff you know the barrier of entry was quite high and they've sort of overcome that in a lot of ways not completely but they've a lot of there's a lot of tools now that kind of alleviate the need to do this kind of hardcore coding a lot of convenience tools and now you have like visual scripting and these kind of things i remember a while ago there was this huge red post on the unity 3d subreddit basically just this big list of complaints a person had with the state of unity now the points were coherent enough but in the end it was just one long big complaint letter i know a lot of people who are successfully working with unity complaint free for the most part and are you know making a lot of money and are forging a nice successful life for themselves around the unity platform and you know unity is not perfect and it's not going to be perfect because any organizational product that's run by people is going to be flawed to some degree but what they've managed to accomplish and achieve since their inception is really unparalleled with anything i've ever seen before not just the tooling and the expansive suite and their constant updates but also this huge community and that's one of the biggest strengths of unity no matter what problem you run into you'll always find some post on the unity forums or someone to help and that stuff is really invaluable ultimately if you feel unity is not the tool for you then jump to another one you know jump to game maker godot construct three there's plenty out there you know and continue the game dev journey on your own terms but realize that each of those platforms or choices or paths that you take will have its own challenges bugs and shortcomings you know they are not perfect you know there's no perfect one-size-fits-all solution for this stuff if only life was so simple right and at some point we just need to make a choice and work with what we have and focus on finding happiness through our creative output you don't want to get tangled up the starting line and not even be part of the race which is what is happening to a lot of people as i can see so do yourself a favor and stop stressing about things that can't be changed and get on with things you know complaining will not bring you any closer to finding happiness and success but working on and finishing a game now that is a rush so anyways guys thanks for watching please do give the video a like if you found it interesting make sure you subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and come visit uh me on discord we have a pretty thriving community there at this point alright guys see you in the next video bye [Music]

Channel: Lost Relic Games

Views: 30,750

Keywords: indie dev, game dev, Unity3d, learn game dev, unity, tips for beginner game devs, lost relic games, john stejskal, advice, game dev tips, indie dev advice, game development, how to make games, how to get into game development, game development beginner, game development college, how to make first indie game, how to learn game dev, tips for beginner game dev, tips for starting game dev, starting first indie game, game design for beginners, game devlog, game development unity

Id: EIjRmMtQw9k

Length: 11min 35sec (695 seconds)

Published: Fri May 21 2021