I tried to find some answers to a few questions I have about Unity3D games development. I want to create 2D mobile games.
The thing I really want to know is if I can create a mobile game for different platforms at one time (as cordova can build Android / iOS / Windows hybrid apps) and if I have to pay a license or something to do that.
I read that it is cross-platform but the official website doesnt give more info about how can you do it or the prerequisites to create them.
You won't need to purchase any licencing for those platforms. You will need to start paying when your annual turnover is high enough but I doubt you have to worry about that now. See here: https://unity3d.com/get-unity. Unless you make $100 000 a year off of Unity then you can deploy to all platforms for free. If you make that large amount you will have to purchase the pro licence and additional platform specific licences.
Unity builds on the Unity Player for mobile games, so as long as ur target platform can handle Unit Player, u can distribute ur game. U can see a current list on their website, but as I know, it supports all current platforms.
The compatibility between those platforms, are independent on development aspect. U create ur game with Unity and then set the target platform to deploy.
As for the licening, first of all Unity itself pro costs about 1024$, and every platform i think another 1024$ so u could first use the free version and after a bit of success easy upgrade to the pro version. On the other hand u can use the free version as long as u stay with ur yearly income under 100 000$
yes you can create cross platform games for Android, windows and IOS etc. You don't necessarily have to buy license. you can use free unity3d but keep in mind there are certain things you are not allowed to change, such as startup splash screen. also if you reach revenue of 100k there is a fee.
here is a link for license info you can find all the details https://unity3d.com/legal/eula
Related
I'm just starting to work with Unity engine and I want to know
1. Unity free version has the ability to publishing game on Google Play Store?
What are the limitations of the free version (Unity Personal)?
Thanks.
The public, free version has virtually all the functionality that the paid version has.
To answer your questions:
Yes, unity free can publish on google play
The limitations are mainly on Support from the Unity Company. Also you get a discount in the assetstore with the paid versions.
You need a paid version if you earn more than $100.000 a year.
I believe there may be an extended profiler with the paid version, but I'm not sure.
Also, the free version forces the Unity logo on your splash screen (initial loading screen) on publish builds. You can remove this by purchasing the paid version.
I am going to start my first game on unity which is a real time multiplayer game for android. I want to ask few things.
Do I need to buy pro version or any license for the whole process (from development to submission to play store, I know that splash screen can not be change). My game is almost like 8 pool ball with all multiplayer features (create user profile, play with friends, play with Facebook friends, challenge friends, leader board filters etc etc) like in 8 pool ball. I am planning of using Photon for multiplayer.
I also need the Web and Facebook version as well in future.
I also see few pages about this but I am still confuse.
Thanks in advance.
The Unity3D personal version does NOT support C# sockets on mobile, so no 3rd party realtime plugin, neither Photon nor any other, will work on Android (or on iOS) with the personal version of Unity3D, but they all require Unity3D pro.
There is only one exception to this: PUN+ works even with Unity3D Personal on Android and iOS, because it applies a fallback to use C++ sockets through a native plugin on platforms, on which C# sockets are not available in Unity3D Personal. However, this is only true for PUN+ (Photon Unity Networking Plus), not for PUN (Photon Unity Networking).
Unity in Version 5 has no engine-specific pro-Features anymore. So basically free = pro (besides some services and splash screens). So you can go with Unity 5 free and e.g. Photon.
Regardings costs: It could be that you need some sort of webservice for your game (managing profiles etc.) so the webserver could produce some costs. But for getting started there are many free services out there like https://www.heroku.com/
Furthermore you will need to pay the 25$ fee for Google Play to publish the game.
I've been developing applications for a long time now, but now I want to jump into Phone applications development. There are four main candidates:
Nokia's Symbian
Apple's iPhone
Google's Android
Microsoft Windows Mobile Phone
Can anyone suggest one, considering documentation, market, samples and availabilty of emulators, I'm not a millionaire so I can't buy it unless I know it would mean profits!
I don't have much preferences as for languages, but to stay within C# would be nice, however I've been thru Assembler for a long time, so it's hard to scare me :)
There are many factors to consider such as where the biggest market is, and so on. But ignoring those factors and thinking just about technical and money issues, the clear answer is start with Android.
The Android SDK is totally free. The iPhone dev tools need a Mac, so if you're not a Mac user, you need to buy a Mac. If you're not a Mac user, then it's probably a safe bet that you don't already know Objective C, which you'll need for iPhone. You don't even need a phone, there is an emulator that works wonderfully. It's very rare that I've made something that works in the emulator but doesn't work or works differently on a real phone. So the emulator is quite excellent.
Android programming is Java, and is very similar to C#.
Android development is much more approachable and easy for development (for getting started at least) than Objective C and iPhone.
There are many online resources available, but the book "Hello, Android" is actually very good. It's dated, though, goes back to version 1.5 of the SDK and we're at 2.2 today, but the fundamentals for getting started are pretty much the same.
You may decide to go another way, but in a handful of hours you can be writing your first Hello World program on Android free of charge. Even if you decide to start on another platform, you can hardly go wrong by giving Android a shot first.
Another thing that's worth noting is that Android is way easier to sell and distribute your apps than iPhone, making it a better place to start. There is no app approval process with the Android marketplace, so you can have your app posted for sure without wondering whether the powers that be will approve your first app for sale or to give away.
It bears mentioning that if you go the Microsoft route, your C# experience will transfer almost completely, and you'll be amazed at how close the compact SDK is to writing plain Windows apps. (At least, it was in 2007, the last time I wrote a Microsoft phone app.) But forget I brought this up-- if you want to be a serious phone developer for consumers, I recommend you forget about Microsoft at least for now.
If your plan is to create and market Paid apps, versus just free ones, don't forget to also consider and evaluate potential revenues and existing competition, instead of just your development cost of entry.
My local, and not necessarily statistically significant, sample shows a larger number of iPhone developers making more money than Android developers. The amount of money to be made, if you produce an app just near the top 10% of apps in many categories, may be well over enough to amortize the higher initial costs of a development system, certificates and testing with iOS devices.
However, for iPhone development, you may have to create a stand-out app, as many app niches in the App store are already filled with several dozens of apps. The absolute number of potential competing apps in the Android store is far lower in many areas. You will need to evaluate the competition in your area of expertise or interest.
First, you forgot RIM (Blackberry's OS). You will find this graph usefull to analyzie your audience (I think the graph is for the USA only): Source of the image
Microsoft Phone 7 will soon reach the market with new devices so it is hard to tell what market share they will take. Their IDE for Windows Phone 7 is free and it supports C#.
Can't say much about the other OSs other than the fact that iOS has the most extensive store and fanatic fans that are willing to buy those apps- but that info is only from what I read on the net and see from friends around me.
You may find the beginning-phone-applications-development question helpful as well.
Windows Phone 7's API will be based on C#, but most of the other stuff about it is still speculation.
Android has the lowest cost of entry, essentially free - and will use Java (which is very similar to C#).
The iPhone has a higher cost of entry - you need to own a Mac (or somewhat less legally, a hacked together OSX install). Plus once you've devloped your app it costs $99 per year to become a registered developer, allowing you to put the app on actual phones, and sell through the App Store. You'll also need to learn Objective-C, which uses a syntax which is a little different to C# and Java.
On the flip side to this, the iPhone tools are very good, and the market is huge, there are also some good online free courses (including the videos of the Stanford course available on iTunes).
Don't know much about the Nokia toolset, and I wouldn't start developing for old-school Windows Mobile now - it's a dead-end.
Some thoughts:
If you have a mac then the choice is certainly the iPhone since all the development tools are free.
AFAIK the Android SDK is an Eclipse extension and can run on pretty much any environment, and is also free.
Mirosoft charges for its IDE, and probably has the smallest audience.
I am pretty sure you will find more community support for iPhone or Android development too.
There are also cross platform options, such as PhoneGap, which may be worth your consideration.
With all technical considerations being roughly equivelant, the most "profitable" platform would have to be the one with the largest untapped consumer base for the particular app(s) you intend to develop.
Two factors come into play which you can assess
Size and growth potential of the market. There are plenty of charts and opinion articles around on this to allow you to make an assessment. If you can't find them, just drop those 4 topics you listed into google alerts and watch the incoming articles to your mailbox for a while.
Saturation of the app marketplace, in particular in the markets your app addresses. Your own market research would be best at identifying this.
The only other consideration which may apply to specific types of apps would be if there is a fundamental feature your app requires of the platform, and whether respective platforms support it. For example you won't get far making a flash based player on iPhone.
I have a very popular Apple iPhone app and wish to port to another mobile platform. What is best the Palm Pre or Google Android? The Android has more popularity with manufacturers but I worry about installation issues and incompatibilities. The Pre has one carrier and one mfr but I worry its sales will be too low.
My app uses an SQLite database and is content rich and over 200MB.
You did not mention if your app was paid or free, and whether it included ads or not. The story is clear regarding both of those on Android. You can not yet sell Pre applications, and we don't even know how Palm is going to handle paid applications. I am also not aware of advertising solutions for Pre.
As for the number of users, Android beats Pre hands down currently. And being the more open platform, I have no doubt in Android enjoying faster growth as well.
Android has the ability to be written in Java a generic enough way that your J2ME ports which can then run on Sonys, Blackberries, Nokias and Samsungs should be a short hop away if you desired. However a lot more detail of what you application did would be necessary as it might be something that is very achievable in a short time frame on the Palm
Which may sway you decision as to Android and Pre thats probably a coin flip decision
You might want to add BlackBerry to your considerations.
When combining all of the RIM models available, the total number of units sold beats the total units sold for Pre and Android devices combined.
Plus they have their App World service up and running now for selling your app through.
Jim
Ahhh, the great debate. Likely to start a holy war. It seems to me that there is a bigger buzz about the Pre than the Android. On the other hand, Palm has failed at this once before, and I have a hard time counting Google out.
I think I'm in the Pre camp. Get in early. Risk versus reward.
Couple of points to port your iphone application on Android and Pre devices
Android: recently they come out with native support, so it should not be too hard to port cpp code to android paltform using JNI
Palm Pre: As if now, development is purely supporting using Java script, and i am afraid you will have to re-write your app to support Pre.
My obvious choice will be go with Android first, this platform is supported by many OEMs and many carriers worldwide while Pre is limited to one carrier and with only one device at the moment in the market. Android definitely has much better market penetration than Pre
I'd definitely go with Android. The palm pre is making progress, but is still rare as far as smartphones go. If your app caters to a niche market in any way, you're likely to find the market is just too small.
Just one thing to remember with Android, though -- you can't make a 200MB app. The phones only allow apps to be stored in onboard memory, which is usually about 512MB with the OS taking 300MB. 200MB is the entire storage space for all apps on the phone. Android phones come with SD cards where data, but not applications, can be stored. You'll probably need to allow users to download your app's database to their SD card after they've installed a smaller, data-less application.
I'd go for Android too, (ok we now have a clearer vision compared to when the question was first asked ;) )
It's just there, everywhere now, so it can't be ignored. Plus i'm more of a Java developer ;).
Actually my concern is the opposite of yours: I'm an Android developer, and I port my apps to the iPhone. I used to do it by hand, but I found this product called ,iSpectrum ( http://www.flexycore.com ). There a video showing an Android 3D app ported to iPhone in 2 days only. This may be interesting a choice tool for you (if you decided to choose Android against Palm...)
I'm answering my own question because its been so long since I asked that a lot has changed. Primarily I went ahead and ported to the Android thanks to some very good answers here and my intuition that Palm was not stable enough as a company. And in hindsight that was the perfect move...Palm almost went out of business having been snapped up at the last minute by HP...and Android rocketed to be more popular than the iPhone. And our product, iBird Explorer, ended up becoming one of the most profitable ports we have ever done. Its also one of the best selling apps in the reference category of the Marketplace. Especially from a grossing income point of view.
I developed a flashcard program a while back for learning Japanese. I've been considering porting it to a cell-phone. What is a good target platfrom? I'm thinking about iPhone, HTC Touch HD (system software: Windows Mobile) or a Nokia (system software: Symbian). Since I know a bit of JavaME, something that runs that would also be cool.
Here's the most recent market share data. Have you considered building a web-based product consumable by all smartphones with decent web browsers? Sites like x.facebook.com are not OS-specific but are app-like enough to provide a good user experience. Building such a site and charging a subscription would be one approach to serve all markets.
Well the Apple store just celibrated its 1,000,000,000 download the other day, so I would say that the iPhone is the largest and easiest phone market to target. Also the Apple store makes it extremely easy to sell your application (they keep part of the revenue of course).
Perhaps you might like to ask which phone has the largest market share in Japan?
Also I understand Microsoft has plans to start an app store for Windows Mobile.
Since you know JavaME, take a look at developing for Android. It doesn't have a large market share, but at least you'll be able to leverage your existing skills.
You won't be able to find a common language and development environment that works on the majority of phone platforms. Once you select a platform, you're kind of committed to it unless you want to port your app to an entirely different language.
Nokia has started heavily pushing a mobile development platform based on Qt. Nokia sells a LOT more phones than Apple does.
Why write iPhone app #1,000,001 when you'd be lucky to get $500 for your investment?
There's a huge craze around iPhone apps... at this point it's totally unjustified from a developer point of view. (It's great for the users)
Qt is a really amazingly well done C++ platform (Nokia bought it, obviously :). I'm having a good time writing PC apps with it... I plan on buying a Nokia phone I can write Qt apps for soon. At that point, I'll be ditching my old iPhone (original unit, not 3G).
When the SDK came out, I thought the world of the iPhone. I even bought Apple stock. However, no Java & no Flash because Jobs is a control freak is just plain stupid. GPL incompatibility really hurts, too. I'm also not buying a Mac just to develop software for the thing.
A few weeks ago I was reading an article about a product called "rohmobile" that was a custom Ruby framework that run's on a micro ruby web server. It allows you to compile your application against all the popular mobile phones (Apple, Microsoft, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian). It seemed like a very cool idea and it's open source actively under development. The framework comes with a sync soltuion, so you can persist data to the local device using REST/SOAP. As I explored the product a bit more, the only thing that seemed like it would be a pain is the setup of the enviroment(s) needed to compile the code for the various device.... if you could make it past this, then you'd have a solution where you could support a bunch of difference devices with a single code base!
http://www.rhomobile.com/
** I've never programmed in Ruby but the syntax and the demo made it look really simple, since it's really just a local web page running on the micro web server installed on the device! The UI is HTML/CSS based. I think the product is still in Beta...
Just my 2cents~
Well I would start to find a system / programing language which is available for the top phones on the market.
I think a good go is python for that. Which makes it easy to use large portions of the same code on all of the phones which are going to be supported.
Then I would probably start with the iPhone, because I believe its userbase is still demanding for new toys :)
Creating a webapplication would be another way... but that would mean you need to be online. if you are not using flash or some other possibilities of persistent storage.
P.S.: I would not use javame :) .. I still don't like anything java at all