As I’ve mentioned before, I’m using Unity3D as my development environment, and I’m planning to deploy to iPhone and Facebook.  I’m using Unity3D on my PC to create the application that I’m then moving that every so often (one way) to Unity iPhone on the Mac.  While this isn’t an optimal workflow, it’s still not bad at all if you’re planning to deploy to a platform besides iPhone (like say, Facebook).  In a few months (weeks?), Unity 3.0 will be coming out and it will have a single, unified development environment and I imagine that what I’m doing now will be much easier, but when I started development on this project in the fall, that wasn’t an option.  I did realize pretty early on in the process that I wanted to deploy out to Facebook and that it wouldn’t be that much more trouble (and I was right, thankfully).  In March, at the GDC (Game Developers Conference), dimeRocker began making themselves known to the world.  It sounded like a perfect match for me — it works with Unity, and they provide a series of addons to integrate your Unity3D game to Facebook.

We’re trying to put the “game” back into Facebook games.  So many of the Facebook “games” are not much more than click-fests — they’re the level grind of the MMORPG brought via AJAX instead of 3D graphics, but the basic concept is the same — “spend time here doing this mundane stuff and you’ll have something to brag about to your friends later”.  I also see more and more people turning away from games like Mafia Wars, which used to be fairly strategic but has ended up as a “who can shell the most real world money and time into this” game.  Farmville (or Frontierville, I suppose) would be another example of this.  And while I know a lot of people who enjoy all 3 of those, I also know more and more people who are turning away from these games, which are barely games at all in the traditional sense of the word.  That’s what I mean when I say we’re trying to put the “game” back into facebook games — I want people to enjoy Sparky the Road Clown purely for the sake of enjoying it.  While yes, we’ll have some paid downloadable content (DLC) available, it won’t be critical to playing the game or a way to get achievements that might normally take days spent playing the game — it’ll be more like content packs that increase the enjoyment of the game but don’t give you an edge just because you bought them.

I think Unity3D plus dimeRocker is going to be a winning combination for myself and a lot of other indie game developers.  dimeRocker makes it really easy to socialize your game, and Unity3D makes it really easy to make a great game.  I’ve worked with a ton of different 3D authoring environments over the years (all the way back to doing dynamic VRML via Perl in the mid 90′s — seriously) and Unity3D exceeds them all by so much it’s not even funny.  dimeRocker stores your game on their servers, stores the leaderboards on their servers, handles microtransactions (that feature is coming soon, anyway), gives you the means to invite friends and use the other social aspects of Facebook… it’s a really strong combination.

If you’re on Facebook and interested in checking out Sparky the Road Clown when it’s released next week, the best way to do that is to become a fan of Unseen Things on Facebook.