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Thursday, January 16, 2014

Unity3d for wp7, a success story of porting unity game to windows phone 7

How to make a game for windows phone 7 with unity 3d (a simple introduction).

  Some months ago, maybe 3 or 4, I don't remember very well, a great opportunity bring me unity 3d on my desktop pc, and make me ready to programming some video games for android. But my main platform is wp7! I’m alone so the needs to find great tools for speed up the development process is crucial and unity is a great tool for this purpose, but simple don’t works for Microsoft phone 7. My first idea was to use editor to build some xml, for use in visual studio later. After some time I’ve found ffwd . The same tools that I start to build… great! Less works to do! I was enthusiastic, made a game for phone 7 with unity 3d it’s now possible! And in near a future porting to android or Iphone or flash, windows 8, mac… FFwd is a tool, to porting unity3d game into your phone 7, or better, it’s a tool for porting your unity3d app in xna domain (xbox too). So make a game and make available for a great number of device can be done. So I was newbie to unity, and understand how to use ffwd was not so easy. Now after some months I’m here to share my experience with you. At this time I have the same game, Bouncing Marble, available on wp7 and Android platform, I’ve developed also a Flash version.

Where to start

First of all you need unity 3.5.x, I ‘ve the paid android version so I’m honest I don’t know if works with the free edition, but should works. Second you need FFWD , you can download here. For the first time test a simple spinning cube, just to see what happens, then try to do something more complex. Forget to make a game in unity, then porting to xna in a snap, your game, just to be clear, don’t works out of the box in the Microsoft phone .

FFWD, an introduction

There two files to download one is ffwd (the lib) and second the ffwd template. Unpack template to your folder and fill the directory ffwd with ffwd (library) version. Now you have the project folder called ffwd, right? Well. Now search inside ffwd a folder called unity. This is a unity project, and is the place to developing your game. At this point run unity, and open this project you will find a spinning cube. Now the main task is to “convert” this app into xna project, well you will find a menu in unity called FFWD, open and select “full export”. This unity editor script will export some stuff to xna folder. Now open Visual studio 2010 and load the project into xna folder, before compile make sure to have imported all data file into your vs project then compile and run… I suggest also at this point to read the wiki here.
This is a simple article to help you to start “the adventure”… I hope to have the time to write next article, so stay tuned .        

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