He makes an interesting note about robots in the first chapter... which makes me think about the role of 'ambition' in AI. Any writing about that subject out there?
Great, you're #8 on the App Store for an app that allows you to blur photos... you're so excited that you're going to get rich... Leaves me thinking: Who cares what rank you are on the App Store, making an app that does basically very little (though useful) should NOT make you rich.
I just think of something like Monument Valley - not a throwaway - tons of work - and it DID make them rich. Rightfully so. I guess I'd like to see at least SOME mention of that aspect of it.
Developing with Unity was great overall. Luckily my partner has experience, which accelerated my learning a lot.
The 2 biggest challenges I found were not related to Unity, but to going from web development (my day job) to game development.
1. Programming in 3D: Not much I can say about this since I still struggle with it, except that once I understood vector maths a little more it got much much easier. Even just this silly site helped a lot: https://www.mathsisfun.com/algebra/vectors.html
2. Programming in a game loop: The main thing I've learned about this is to always keep things "event driven" as in, whenever possible trying to avoid checking for something happening in the game loop, and trying to instead have some kind of listener for a change that triggers what you need it to. Also, building state machines is something we're doing now and that has made logic inside the game loop WAY easier.
One other nice thing about Unity was that it reminded me about all the great things about object oriented programming.
Some bad things about Unity:
1. Not super easy to find answers to stuff online. Stack overflow just isn't quite as full in this area.
2. Unity Asset store: I think part of the reason for the first problem is that people are trying to sell their solutions, which ends up limiting free or open source growth.
On cross platform stuff: It worked like a charm, with a couple hiccups: Leaderboard integration and facebook sharing, but since those are platform specific in some ways anyway, that's to be expected - more about configuration really.
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Anyway, thanks for the comment. We're polishing a bit more now, hopefully an update in the coming months. Yes, it's very hard. That's been difficult to get right... but our next game will be much easier!
I recently released my first game using Unity: http://newbeings.com/ and I spent a real long time weighing the different engines. I wish I hadn't spent so much time deciding on an engine, and had just picked one and gotten on with it. I think the differences are pretty negligible for first (and probably even third and second) timers. This news makes me happy!
Your sample size of one is bigger than the guy who wrote this article, who admits to not talking to any schools or graduates. Poorly researched speculation.