Why I Left Buildbox for Unity3D

You’d think this would be a quick and easy answer. It really is at the heart of things. Buildbox is geared towards churning out fast and cheap games. Essentially throwing shit at the wall in hope something sticks. It has endlessly contributed to the mountain of detritus littering the iTunes and Google play stores. Buildbox’s amazing easy of use, large graphical library and quick to publish games made it a very attractive software for game making newbs. I was one such newb and suckered into the sales pitch of “Ultra casual” gaming. Buildbox is fantastic if you’re making an endless runner, Flappy Bird or other such clone. But it’s not good at making real games.

I’m a genuine gamer. I love games and I play them when I have free time, which at this phase is barely 2-3 hours a week. When it comes to semi-casual games I think of Rocket Shark. It was my second game release and as I’ve said before, pushed the limits of Buildbox. It had worlds and a more complex scoring system than simply level running. So leaderboards were absolutely broken (and still are) for Rocket Shark. One day I’ll port his cute self to Unity and finish the game I started and absolutely love.

I made 3 BuildBox games, Bionic Bird, Rocket Shark and Dig Dug Deeper. But they felt cheap, lame and uninspiring. Granted they all were fascinating learning tools, they weren’t “ME” as a true gamer. I want to believe I’m above all that crap and strive to deliver quality games to you. If you’ve watched my other videos and read my articles you can see that shining bright as the sun. I spent weeks just getting a zombie to walk correctly and chase realistically where I could have said “that’s good enough”.

I needed something more.

I’ve been a gamer since before I could remember. I want the best for my games and to deliver the best to the gamers who will eventually enjoy them. I hate what EA and Ubisoft, heck, even Bethesda has done to games. I want better. I can do better, but it will take time to fix the broken world of gaming. So I bought a Humble Bundle.

The Humble Bundle was a large series of assets for Crytek engine. But there wasn’t a darn resource out there to learn the engine. So I pushed that aside for the time being. Then Facebook, that psychic devil introduced me to Ben Tristem’s 50 hour long Unreal Engine course in C++. I thought “awesome, I went to college for this!”. Never got past 2 hours of the course. I was lost, busy at work and studying machine learning. Ben doesn’t give up easy and he introduced me to his Unity course. I signed up and had to learn C#. But it was a fantastic course and for some reason Unity3d just “Stuck” with me. It did everything Buildbox simply could not do, or refused to do out of stubborn simplicity. Whatever the case, Unity and I fell in love with each other.

A $billion dollars$ spent at the Unity Asset store later ( I jest a little), I pumped out Super Panda Adventure Tour, Delicious Desserts Mania and Hex Block!.  But those games were just the beginning! I’m working on an Epic RPG to dethrone Bethesda’s own Interactive worlds reign. Working on a Top Down shooter to impress my fans and raise money for Immortal Realm development. I’m working with another guy with an amazing dream and vision. I have a composer 100% on board. I have a following and people working with me.

Unity is more than just an engine to me. It is what United me with various people around the world to build amazing games.

Why did I choose Unity? Because it brings game makers and gamers together in Unity. We are United to make gaming better!