I've had to make a decision, and it's that I have to drop mobile gaming for now. PC and Mac support will stay, maybe eventually I can port over to mobile, but it's not going to be my target platform anymore.
There's a few reasons for it, and I could go on at length about the nuances of whatever, but it all comes down to the simple issues of Time and Money. To develop cross-platform for Android, iOS, PC, and Mac, it would cost nearly $1000* in licensing just for Unity. If I chose to drop Unity altogether, it would mean either A) a downgrade to 2d sprites or B) finding and learning yet another language (which would more than likely cripple the idea of cross-platforming). In either case A or B, I'd have to go back and learn even more stuff, start over from scratch again, and probably still stuck paying for software licenses.
As it currently stands, sticking as close to the vague "plan" as possible still sounds the best idea. I can keep going in the direction I'm going and make non-mobile games for now with no changes or loss-of-progress. I'm not entirely happy with the whole thing, but I hardly have a choice. This whole project is founded on the idea that I can make a game from scratch, on my own, in my free time, for practically zero financial input, and make profit from it.
Sure, I could just pirate the whole thing. Easily, in fact. It would be a bit suspect if I was suddenly (and publicly) using software that's worth 3 months of rent though. Also, somewhat tied into the sentiment above, I'm still sold on this idea that anyone can do this, and an entire studio-suite of software doesn't fit in with that ideal. I'd be lying if I said I didn't think about it, but I did decide against it.
On the bright side, this actually does give me a few more options now. Mobile gaming is good in its own right, but for actual "gaming" it's usually handicapped by its own limitations. Screen size and resolution, processing power, controls**, these are all things I don't have to be as concerned about. Testing will be a lot easier. I have other new options now too, in regards to game engines and languages as well. I only just found out that Unreal Engine 3 is free to download; how cool is that?
In other news, modeling is still very slow going, but it's going in the right direction. I'm trying to move more into using Unity than using Blender, but it's still a lot to learn. I found some more tutorials though and I'm making some progress. After I have the meshes all set, I'll figure out how to decorate and/or color it, then see what I can do about making it move.
* - That's just for the ability to save in Android and iOS formats. Unity Pro costs over $3000 by itself.
** - Say what you will, mobile gaming flat-out sucks because of three words: No Tangible Buttons.
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