![\"Where's](\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/pXUc2hB.png\")
<\/a>Where\u2019s the code?<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/p>\n So, what did I learn about Unity while making my game, Entropic<\/a>? Quite a bit, but in summary: Unity is awesome, it handles its component engine well, and I look forward to using it again in the future.<\/p>\n I made a few odd design choices near the beginning that I\u2019d like to share, since the rest of the LD was the usual \u201cstarted off well, hit a major issue in the middle, almost jumped ship, but came around in the end and finished it off.\u201d<\/p>\n Entropic is, at its roots, a space sim, and in science fiction space ships tend to have gravity independent of ship acceleration. If a starship starts spinning, actors typically just stumble around a bit.<\/p>\n How is this accomplished in a constrained physics engine like Unity\u2019s while retaining physics-powered movement both inside and outside the ship? One way would be to have multiple physics worlds (aka spaces), one simulating the exterior and the other the interior\u2013but Unity only allows one world to exist. The next best thing are physics layers, which can be configured to only allow interaction between objects in the ship and objects outside the ship. Simple enough, and Unity makes this easy to configure.<\/p>\n I then (too eagerly, in hindsight) decided to add scale into the problem. Ships move at much greater speeds and have much larger sizes than humans within a ship, so I thought it would be a good idea to scale down the \u201cspace\u201d world to account for potential accuracy issues. Easy enough, especially in Unity\u2013just turn down the scale on all the \u201cship exterior\u201d and \u201casteroid\u201d meshes, and it\u2019s done.<\/p>\n It does look really weird, though. (I hid some of the ship bridge\u2019s walls to get this screenshot of both layers combined.)<\/p><\/div>\n One problem that I had early on is that there was very little visibility on the bridge. On the Enterprise, that little screen was enough because they could tell is to look at anything around the ship\u2013with an equally-sized window on a ship, it\u2019s surprisingly hard to tell what\u2019s going on.<\/p>\n<\/a>