How difficult is it to program a 3D board with pieces that move through the tiles and the user is able to rotate the board in any direction to look at and control the pieces movement.

Would this be a job for unity ?

I've attached an example picture. Basically a bevelled cube with 136 tiles.

edit: 152 tiles

The difficulty depends on your experience. Seems fairly simple, relatively speaking.

Yes, you could use Unity for this.

Pretty much any 3D Engine could be used for that.

Such a simple task might even not be to hard to write without the help of an engine, provided you invest the time to learn how to program in DirectX or OpenGL.

Where do you get 136 from? I count 152 or 144, depending on whether the corner triangles count or not.

yes sorry, 152 positions.

What are the advantages of using unity to program this vs otherwise?

yes sorry, 152 positions.

What are the advantages of using unity to program this vs otherwise?

A lot less code? Pretty much just scripting and clicking?

Entirely depends on how much experience you have, if you have little-none I would qualify this as moderately difficult because you'd have a LOT to learn if you tried to make this from scratch.

If you know Unity and have quite a bit of experience doing something similar from scratch, I would still say unity would be faster.

Using an engine such as Unity (there are others as well) you remove a lot of tasks.

It already has a complete graphics pipeline (getting the art and models and animations into your game) and a renderer. It already has a complete audio pipeline and audio support. It already has input support. It has support for visual effects. It also has support for features like collision detection and mouse picking and more.

The benefit is that you don't need to spend your time building all those parts and debugging it on bunches of systems.

The potential drawback is that using a major game engine typically comes with implicit requirements that you have a skilled team. It isn't required, but missing artists often means ugly textures, missing modelers often means ugly models, missing animators often mean ugly animations.

Note that there are already some games similar to what you described, such as Cubistry which was written with Unity.

Thanks for replies,

I have a lot to learn and when I get my first programming book and work through it i'll understand what you guys mean better.

Thanks Frob for brining my attention to Cubistry, it is not what my game design is like though.

It looks like a pretty good reinterpratation of the classic match tiles game. I wonder was candy crush the first, or is it just the most popular?

Is Cubistry a unity game? Edit: Yes it is.

Can you estimate how much extra code would programming such a 3D rotating board take ?

How difficult is it to program a 3D board with pieces that move through the tiles and the user is able to rotate the board in any direction to look at and control the pieces movement.

Would this be a job for unity ?

Actually, it's a job for a 3d modeling program and Unity. You can create and texture it, in say, Blender 3d. The rest is 3d mathematics, which Unity has functions for.