Back in October Vision+Media hosted the final session in our Best Practice Multiplatform Development series. Unity 3D Northwest focused on Unity, the fastest growing game development tool in the market and we were delighted to welcome some great Unity representatives to introduce the 3D game engine to us, share the latest news about the technology from the annual Unite conference in San Francisco, and discuss what the future might hold for the software.
Andy Brammall, UK Marketing Officer for Unity, Andy Stark, Community and Technical Writer for Unity and Will Goldstone, Author and Technical Support Associate for Unity were the guest speakers for the day with Peter Caddock of Studio Liddell and Tony Tickle of Tickle 3D compering the day and joining the Unity representatives on the panel session at the end of the day.
Andy Brammall was first up with his presentation ‘Democratising Games’. Andy took us on a journey through Unity’s history from its founding in Denmark by David Helgason, Joachim Ante and Nicholas Francis, to now being considered one of the top game engines on the market. From Unity 1.0 being launched in 2005 at Apple’s WWDC, the technology now has around 170,000 unique monthly users, there have been 75 million installations of the Unity web player worldwide, and on the iOS App Store around 2,000 games have been built using Unity, accounting for around 15% of games on the store. Additionally the engine allows for users to create and sell assets on the Unity Asset Store, and in September alone $140,000 was generated in sales from the asset store for developers with the top assets generating up to $20,000 each per month.
Next up was Andy Stark with ‘A Technical Exploration of Unity’ who shared some great examples of games built using Unity to demonstrate the various features of the engine. These included GooBall, the game built by the founders of Unity in the rudimentary version of the engine; online playable games Splume and Blush by Flashbang, Paper Moon by Infinite Ammo and Max and the Magic Marker by Press Play; Rochard by Recoil, the first Unity powered PS3 game; Kinect titles Air Band and Mutation Station by Relentless Software; and MegaPixel by 15 year old Forest “Yoggy” Johnson, amongst many others. Also shown were non-games examples such as 3D visualisation projects HelloRacer and helloflower by HelloEnjoy, and simulators created for the V&A Museum and Royal Museum. Peter Caddock also demonstrated an AR project that Studio Liddell have been developing which can be seen at the top of this page.
After lunch Will Goldstone delivered a live demonstration of starting a basic Unity project and, whilst the benefit of what Will covered cannot really be got across in this blog, he did also provide a list of resources for anybody looking to get into development using Unity:
www.3dbuzz.com
answers.unity3d.com
www.design3.com
forum.unity3d.com
www.unity3dstudent.com
video.unity3d.com
www.walkerboystudio.com
For those that use Twitter, Will advised following the #unity3d hashtag and also the following users:
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@andybrammall
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@prime_31
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@AngryAnt
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@quickfingerz
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@Joe_Robins
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@stramit
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@pixelplacement
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@willgoldstone
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The final presentation of the day belonged to Andy Brammall who looked to what the upcoming and future releases of Unity plan to support. The big news from this year’s Unite 11 conference in San Francisco was of the Flash export technology that Unity is currently integrating into the engine. Version 3.5 will also see improvements in the level of detail, path-finding technology, occlusion culling, gamma correction rendering and the introduction of a new particle system. Andy also suggested that Unity are also looking into a social API for Game Centre, Facebook and PSN/XboxLIVE, analytics support and In-App Purchase support.
For anybody interested in working with Unity, the basic version of the engine is available for free from www.unity3d.com. The Pro version costs $1,500 or is available from Manchester-based serious games technology company Second Places (who have recently become an official Unity reseller) for the same price but with Second Places’ virtual world platform Unifier included. For more information visit their website or email [email protected].
