So, after some googling about developer tools i took a closer look at the Unity engine and what it can do for game development. Needless to say i’m completely sold on it. There are a number of reasons for this which i shall outline below:

1. Multi-platform release: Using the unity tools i can release my games across multiple platforms fairly easily. As far as my limited research tells me it should be fairly easy to make packages for android, ios and windows executables with the unity tools

2. c# programming: I’ve spent my whole development life using c# and i’d consider myself pretty good with it. Not only am i used to programming in c# but the fact i can use unity scripts written in c# code means…Unit testing bitches. I’m a big fan of unit testing, speciffically because if i change something down the line i can quickly discover whether or not its going to affect any of my other code just by running the unit tests

3. price: Unity’s tools are my favourite price…free (they will require me to pay for a licence once my game makes a certain amount of money, but i’m happy with that because my game will be making money).

4. tutorials: there are masses of tutorials all over the web that will make learning how to do things in unity much easier.

Although changing to Unity will mean i have to ditch some of the progress i made in my own stand alone java project, i can quickly canabalise the code i used and be at a similar point in my unity project.

Also i’ve been watching some unit tutorials, specifically one about creating a match 3 game. The author of the tutorial had a pretty neat way of detecting the ‘neighbours’ of a given tile by using box colliders as triggers. Hopefully by the next status update i should have a fully functioning screen where tiles can be moved around, matches detected and matched tiles removed