MrJoy got tired of the crude graphics found in 2D Flash-based desktop tower defense games. Unity helped MrJoy create When Orcs Attack, a tower defense game that gives players a rich 3D experience.
Who Are You And What Do You Do?
I'm Jon Frisby, the founder of MrJoy. My background is as a software engineer in web development and business intelligence, but like many engineers I've dreamed of making games since I was a kid. Specifically, ever since I played Legend of Zelda (the original gold cartridge, naturally). Heck, I'm wearing a Legend of Zelda t-shirt right now. I've been dabbling in game development for the past few years but sometime around late May I wound up spotting what I think is a key market opportunity, and so in July I left my last startup after six years to pursue it.
What Games Are You Working On?
I'd have to kill you if I told you... However, I can tell you about our first game built with Unity. It's a new kind of tower defense game called When Orcs Attack. (Freeverse is distributing the Mac version under the title, Hordes of Orcs.) Up until now, tower defense games for the casual gamer have all been somewhat lacking when it comes to visual aesthetic and depth of game play. Casual gamers should not have to sacrifice quality when they want to get a quick game on.
When Orcs Attack features detailed 3D environments, multiple game types, and even an adaptive balance engine from +7 Systems. Players can spend gold on an assortment of towers and walls, which they can layout freely anywhere on the map. They can also spend mana on magic spells, and stop time while deploying their strategy. Unity helps bring all of this to life as native Windows and Mac apps, and the Unity Web Player, which gives players the same desktop 3D experience in their web browser.
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What's The Production Plan?
Madness! Our goal is to get something new out the door every quarter or so. Unity helps us do that by taking care of a lot of the heavy lifting. A huge part of our focus is on how to make games that scale down on low-end machines, up on high-end machines, and have very small download sizes. Our next strategy game will have more content than When Orcs Attack, richer environments, and better-looking graphics while still maintaining a similar download size. It'll look better and run faster on low-end hardware too.
What Obstacles Did You Run Into?
This was my first experience developing a 3D game. I've dabbled in 2D game development previously, but the realities of 3D are of course quite a bit different. So I was learning the math, the technical constraints, the project management constraints, C#, Unity, and trying to design and implement a game all at once with a hard deadline of 3 months from start to finish, which Unity helped us meet.
I wound up using the Unity 2.0 beta because Apple shipped their Santa Rosa MacBook Pro with buggy OpenGL drivers. Normally I'm really allergic to beta software, but I'm glad I bit the bullet and ran with it because 2.0 proved to be well worth it. The improvements in web deployment alone were a huge win.
Which Was the Best Part of The Unity Experience?
The support on not only the development, but also the business side is priceless. Unity just works at the end of the day so we have more time to focus on meeting our insane goals. For example, the rich art pipeline in Unity is an amazingly powerful tool when designing games for the multiple targets of desktop apps and web player.
Unity also gave us the ability to customize the deployment resolution of a texture without actually changing the on-disk representation. This made it possible to keep the web version in the 5-6 MB range during the entire development process. Unity's flexibility to tweak which textures could be scaled down, and which textures needed extra detail made it possible to build a richer, more detailed download version in parallel with the web version.
