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A good use of "GetAxis" is for any type of key press that you need variation on. For instance all the character controllers use it for WASD controls. I have used it to great effect for controlling throttle in vehicles.

I actually attended one of these Microsoft events, and it was very informative ( i also won a free phone so that was cool). Basically the windows phone/metro builds of unity are radically different than any other platform. As it stands now, Unity uses .net 2.5 (I may be wrong on the exact version), on every deploy target except windows phone/metro. On those builds Unity compiles out to use the latest version of .net (4.5 i believe at the moment), so that the code can run natively on these devices. So theoretically, you should be getting better performance on these devices ( key word there being theoretical ). Microsoft has been working directly with Unity to make this change happen, but as you can imagine there are quite a few bugs/quirks in this version, as they are having to re-write a ton of stuff to update to the latest version of .net. The Unity forums for windows development (http://forum.unity3d.com/forums/windows-development.50/) is a great place to see a bunch of these issues brought to light and discussed. Unfortunately there aren't a ton of fixes for most of the issues at the moment. As far as getting the dev environment setup, I had to use windows 8.1 with the 8.1 sdk (don't mess with the 8 sdk as it is out of date) installed into the latest version of VS 2013. The process is not well documented and a huge pain to get working correctly. On top of getting the dev environment setup, you will have to worry about 3rd party plugins from the asset store. Because of the changes I listed above, a lot of the plugins from the asset store will just break. Basically anything that is trying to do file i/o is going to be busted, unless of course the developer of the plugin specifically states that it is tested on wp8/metro builds. I spent most of my time "porting" my game to wp8 installing the the correct sdk and then stripping my game of most of my 3rd party assets/plugins. As far as touch input goes I only have experience with the wp8 builds, but in that case the input functionality works identical to the iphone/android builds. I would assume the same would hold true for windows store (metro) builds. I hope this helps, but to be honest this is an undocumented learning experience for us all

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Thank you so much for your feedback! Sorry for the delayed response to this (i was actually hospitalized, but all is ok) I wish I could have responded to you sooner. I thought about adding some of these features earlier in the dev cycle, but they didn't really work out as planned. Moving left or right to dodge made the game extremely difficult and was a bit out of the spirit of a "flap like". I did try shadows but for some reason Unity wasn't rendering them where you could see them. This made them virtually useless and just a resource hog on lower end devices. I do agree that there should be some sort of indicator to help the player know when they are super close to the terrain. I did try messing with camera angles, but it honestly caused more confusion with so much altitude change. I will see if I can come up with some sort of altitude indicator in the UI I am with you on how much fun it is to stay really close to the ground. In fact just today I was contemplating taking this game and using it as a starting point for a bit more ambitious game. Same basic idea where you are flying through a canyon of some sort at high speed. In this new game I think you would be running from some type of enemy instead of chasing them down. My thought was to implement a radar system to force the player to skim the ground as much as possible. The higher you are the more you show up on radar, get to high some sort weapon locks on to you and destroys you. In this version I think i would try to implement lateral movement as well as banking to maneuver around dynamic obstacles (falling bridges, rocks, trees, etc). I think it could be fun. Thanks again for your feedback! This community is awesome!

First off thanks so much for taking a look at my game, and offering feedback! Would you mind explaining a little more what you mean? The idea of the game is to be a parody of "flappy bird" like games in which instead of cute little birds be the hero they are now lunch. So that means the primary focus is for the bear to be able to fly up when touching the screen and fall when not, then of course eat the birds when they come into contact. What part in particular are you referring to? I will say that there is a bug in the current version that makes the gameplay really bad on lower end devices, in fact it can be completely unplayable on things like an iPhone 4. An update has been submitted that will resolve that issue.

that is weird. no it is Universal. Try this link here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/super-lazy-angry-robot-flying/id885564312?mt=8 or just search the app store for SLARFB Thanks and sorry for the inconvenience!

Hey everyone, I am fairly new here but I wanted to see if you would be willing to give me some feedback on a game I made. This is a joke game I made in one week as a way to blow off steam (and exercise a bit of creative freedom) from the other games I am currently working on. Basically the idea was to come up with the most ridiculous concept for a game that I could and see how far I could get in a week. Well at the end of the week I had something that I kept picking up and playing, so i decided to release it. If you all would be so kind as to give me your honest feedback on what you think I would really appreciate it! iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/super-lazy-angry-robot-flying/id885564312?ls=1&mt=8 Android build: https://www.dropbox.com/s/f8ttmnarlhagy5c/SLARFB.apk

I have been using these tools for the past year or so and cannot imagine using Unity without them: http://www.protoolsforunity3d.com/ I know that they may be expensive, but trust me, they are worth every penny. There is a "pro grids" tool that should be exactly what you are needing. It has lots of options and makes using Unity soooo much better.

Everything PrimeDerektive said is absolutely true, but I would add that the built in 3d text should not be used in most cases for UI b/c it is just way too heavy. With a sprite based UI, you are dealing with very minimal overhead computationally, while the 3d text can contain gross amounts of vertices that have to be updated on each frame. I have used it the 3d text before and it can be nice for a title screen or something like that, but if you are using it solely for your UI then you are adding a ton of unneeded weight to your scene. As far as wether you should buy NGUI or wait for the new Unity implementation, that is a tough question. NGUI is very well supported and constantly updated. I would say that once the new Unity UI is added, NGUI will be updated to take advantage of that system and make it even better. Considering the guy who wrote NGUI was hired by Unity to help with the new UI it is a safe bet that NGUI is going to be a "better" version of that system.

I really like this asset for AI: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/6563 it is free and has good support. This asset will get you up and running with AI, but in order to create something useful you will need to understand behavior trees and how they work. this is a good article on the core concepts: http://aigamedev.com/open/article/bt-overview/

I did the same type setup for my game. In my game you build out a aircraft with numerous parts and pieces. To keep everything straight and looking correct, for each part available there are two spawnpoints that are nothing more than empty GOs that carry the proper rotation and location. When instantiating a new item you find the spawnpoint where you want it to go, instantiate it, and then parent the new item to the spawnpoint transform. As a child, a GO will inherit it's parent's rotation and location upon instantiation, so you can safely assume that the new item will be in the correct position with the correct rotation (if your instantiated item's local rotation and position are zeroed out ). Now if the new instantiated item has a spawnpoint as well, then you can create very interesting "trees" of items that will just always work.

Just a heads up about that project. While super useful and easy, it doesn't work across all platforms (namely Windows store/Windows Phone) and the author seems to have dropped off the face of the earth in regards to updating the project or responding to emails. I was using this project until I decided to port a WIP game to WP8 and it just completely blew up. I found this project that works pretty well: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/768 That project does require a bit more setup and knowhow, but it is also a lot less "black box" in how it stores everything. basically you are in full control of the saving scheme. I have been using it in my very complex game with no issues for quite some time now. If anybody needs help with it pleas pm me.

here is a quick script I wrote and published for NGUI that handles switching atlases if anyone is interested: http://www.tasharen.com/forum/index.php?topic=832 also here is a series of tutorials made by the NGUI creator. Please watch them all as they are super informative. I think tutorial 2 covers the layout system in detail. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQGZdUwzE8gmvgjomZSNFJg

Don't mess with setting the resolution. If you are using the latest version of NGUI (3.6+) you have a very nice anchoring system that will handle this for you. I have a game that has elements anchored to all four corners and center, with offsets and everything and it works across every mobile device I can get my hands on. Basically what I do is set up empty UIWidgets to represent each point that I need anchored to (topLeft, TopCenter, TopRight, etc.). Then you can set the anchor for each of those elements. The anchor is in the UIWhatever script at the bottom. Set the anchor type to "unified". It will automatically set the values to each side based on where the widget is located on the screen at the time. If you wanted to set for the top left then you set the anchor sides to be "left=target's left, right=target's left, top=target's top, bottom=target's top". Then drag that empty UIWidget up to the top corner( or set all values to zero ) Now the element is anchored to the top left and any child elements will be so as well. no matter where you move them inside of that parent, they will always stay in relation to the topLeft corner. Here is the tricky part. Dealing with multiple resolutions (this is not nearly as big a deal as before when you had things like the iPhone 3gs and the iphone 4 with retina). IF you really need to deal with multiple resolutions, then you have to build your entire UI to point to "reference Atlas" that is actually only a pointer to a real atlas. Then you have to setup multiple atlases for each resolution and then have a script that can detect what device you are on and then switch out what atlas you want to use at runtime. I hope this helps someone, if not please PM me and I can try to help further.

The shader tutorial is an absolute must watch if you ever plan on making your own shaders. It dives in pretty deep, but is great to understand that you could be killing your performance on a certain device just because you chose or wrote a shader that is not optimized for that platform.