Unity Technologies Blog

Earlier this week iLounge released their 2010 iPod + iPhone Buyer’s Guide and a number of Unity titles are featured in their top games list! For starters you can check it all out at the following URL:

iLounge’s 2010 iPod + iPhone Buyer’s Guide

It’s a rather large (20+MB) download as they provide a ton of material, including their suggestions for top games and applications to purchase if you own an iPod touch or iPhone. But as noted above the exciting point for us is the fact that a number of Unity-authored games are listed in their Top 100 Games of 2009! So to help promote those games and offer them some extra kudos I’ll preempt the download above and list them here in the order they appear in the guide:

Downhill Bowling from Game Resort LLC (page 22)
Downhill Bowling Lite (free)
Downhill Bowling ($2.99)

Vans SK8: Pool Service from Fuel Games (page 23)
Vans SK8: Pool Service Lite (free)
Vans SK8: Pool Service ($2.99)

Battle Bears from SkyVu Pictures (page 27)
Battle Bears Free (free)
Battle Bears ($0.99)

Inkvaders from Chillingo (page 27)
Inkvaders Lite (free)
Inkvaders ($1.99)

10 Balls 7 Cups from Graveck (page 31)
10 Balls 7 Cups ($0.99)

Note: 10 Balls 7 Cups has been rereleased on the AppStore under the name Skee-Ball as well!

Volcano Planet by Jelly Biscuits (page 35)
Volcano Planet Lite (free)
Volcano Planet ($0.99)

A huge kudos to all the developers behind the games above, clearly it’s a job well done and you deserve some recognition for your efforts!

Now that we’re clear of the frantic week we call Unite 2009 let’s talk about the also incredible Unity Awards! Once again we had a huge increase in not only the total number of submissions (129!) but also in the overall content and quality of those submissions. It was a tough job to pare down the submissions into a list of top contenders in each category, and then even tougher for our team of judges to whittle those down to a list of their top-5 favorites in each category. The end result was that 13 games in particular seemed to stand out the most as those titles occupied the top-5 positions across all four categories. Without further adieu let’s go through each of the categories and see a list of the finalists and winners…

Best Overall
The best overall category is the one in which we recognize the true best-of-breed content for the year and it was a tough task to say the least. There were many titles that came close to being finalists, but ultimately only a few made that final run at the title.

Winner: Max & the Magic Marker, developed by Press Play

Runner Up: Lego Star Wars: Quest for R2-D2, developed by Three Melons

Finalist: Paper Moon, developed by Infinite Ammo
Finalist: Monospace, developed by Nonverbal
Finalist: EnerCities, developed by Paladin Studios

Best iPhone Game
Given the popularity of iPhone/iPod touch games in general, and of course the way in which Unity iPhone has become the dominant middle-ware tool of choice, we felt it truly necessary to recognize the best iPhone games on their own.

Winner: Monospace, developed by Nonverbal

Runner Up: Samurai: Way of the Warrior, developed by Mad Finger Games

Finalist: Snake Galaxy (now being published as Paris Galaxy), developed by DigDog
Finalist: Battle Bears, developed by SkyVu Pictures & Blackish
Finalist: Touch KO, developed by Adam and Matt Mechtley

Best Visual Design
One of the exciting things about a tool like Unity is that it lets you experiment in ways you might not be able to with other tools. The rapid iterative abilities and easy work flow make experimentation easy, and that leads to some incredibly beautiful and unique visuals.

Winner: Doppelscope, developed by Tobias Baumann

Runner Up: Blush, developed by Flashbang Studios

Finalist: Choma, developed by Knife Media
Finalist: Max & the Magic Marker, developed by Press Play
Finalist: Paper Moon, developed by Infinite Ammo

Best Technical Achievement
To go along with rewarding the best visual effort we wanted to recognize those titles that displayed solid technical achievement as there are so many folks out there pushing the technical boundaries with Unity. This category was extra tough as we all have our pet areas of interest with our technology, audio, shading/graphics, game play mechanic and more.

Winner: Blush, developed by Flashbang Studios

Runner Up: Max & the Magic Marker, developed by Press Play

Finalist: Time Donkey, developed by Flashbang Studios
Finalist: Touch KO, developed by Adam and Matt Mechtley
Finalist: Super Volei Brasil 2, developed by Aquiris

Closing Thoughts
As I noted up top there were 129 separate entries at the beta stage and that’s an awesome turn out! I know that not all of you were able to get a final build submitted and certainly not all of you made it into the final judging stage (involved roughly 30 entries), and even fewer of you made it into the top-5 finalist categories. But through it all the hard work and effort the Unity community puts forth to make killer content is a critical component in driving our technology forward. Content is king y’all, and without you I don’t know where our tech would be. So thanks to everyone that participated in this year’s Unity Awards and a huge round of applause and hefty kudos to the finalists, and especially the winners. Rock on!

Wow, Unite 2009 has come to a close and once again it was an awesome/incredible/crazy/you-name-it week! Now that I’ve had a day or so to rest and recuperate a bit I figured I’d take a few minutes and jot down some notes and comments about last week’s event. Read on for my thoughts and post up some comments if you have any questions.

Content is King
We all know the phrase “content is king” when thinking about web technologies like ours*, but I think that also applies to conferences as well. The truth is that without high-quality sessions that offer attendees something valuable, our conference wouldn’t be worth much. The good thing is that I think we offered some incredible sessions this week and that feeling was backed-up by the in-person feedback I received on site. Many attendees indicated to me that they felt that each day offered them material they found interesting and more importantly useful. So for that I have to thank the crew internally at Unity Tech as we had many of us up on stage delivering presentations or assisting attendees during hands-on lab. Additionally I have to thank the awesome 3rd party speakers that showed up to deliver presentations as well, they volunteered their valuable time to help others learn more about Unity and that’s a generous offer to say the least. So, content is king even at conferences and all signs seem to indicate that was the case this year once again.

*If you don’t then know this, it’s an indication that for tech companies like us having great content in production is critical. We can have the greatest tech available but if nobody is using it to make cool stuff then who’s really going to know about it or care? So, “content is king”!

Some Incredible Numbers
This past week offered up some incredible numbers that show how much this conference has grown. Just two years ago we held our first conference, Unite 2007, in San Francisco and were excited that we had something like 80 people in attendance and we offered 11 presentations. Then a year later we held the conference again, Unite 2008 was in Copenhagen and it grew even larger attracting roughly 170 people who were there to take in a total of 15 presentations. So this year we held the conference for the third time, again back in San Francisco and the attendance growth continued once again as we had over 350 people in town to attend 21 presentations and 3 classes, this time over four days (compared to prior years being 3-day events). So we’ve gone from 80 to 170 to 350+, and I say 350+ as we had all 437 seats in the Cowell Theater full for the keynote, but many of those were press/media/guests there for that presentation only, we had 350+ there regularly despite a much higher peak number. Beyond that we offered more hands-on lab, we had a bunch more Unity Awards entries (a separate blog post on that is coming!) and we had a significantly larger Unity Tech employee contingent on site as almost all of our 50+ employees were on site. Simply incredible…

Our Community is Awesome
Once again I have to say that the Unity Community rocks! Not only did members of the community step up and deliver presentations, but a bunch more were simply there in attendance welcoming all the community newcomers that were getting introduced and they were all spending time networking, talking about Unity and sharing what they know. We spent lots of time socializing at the Pre-Unite Monday Night User Meeting, the Wednesday night Unity User Group “Drink & Shoot” Party thrown by the folks at dimeRocker and then once again at the official conference party Thursday night. I spent a ton of time each day at the show talking with forum regulars and community newbies, with lots of Flash users looking to make the jump on up to folks that have been using Unity since before I arrived on the scene. So again this past week showed just how awesome of a community we have and so I thank everyone of you (those that could attend as well as those that could not), y’all truly help make Unity and our Unite conferences something special.

What’s Next?
First up is a bit of rest, then come Monday morning we’ll be back at it as there’s a lot to do. First up will be some website updates to both the Unite pages as well as some information about this year’s Unity Awards finalists and winners. Then we’ll work with the awesome guys from ShiftControl to get the session videos they helped record prepared and posted online in a much faster manner than years prior. Then after that we’ll start looking forward to next year’s event, where it might be held and how many people we might think will attend. Given the progression we’ve seen it could be even crazier next year and without a doubt that’s exciting beyond belief, I can only imagine what it’s going to be like.

One Last Reminder, Thanks To…
The incredible crew from Melons Catering who delivered top-notch food each and every day. The crew at the Fort Mason Center that helped us put on a great show. Everyone at Unity Technologies for an awesome week of hard work, I know we put y’all through your paces so thanks for stepping up! To each and every 3rd party presenter, I know you put in your own time to prepare and deliver those, it’s appreciated. To ShiftControl who came on-site to handle the session recording, putting in some seriously long hours working under lots of stress with nary a sign of cracking. And finally, one last thanks to everyone that was there in attendance, conferences like this take a massive amount of work, induce mountains of stress and likely age us prematurely, but knowing that y’all enjoyed the week and that you learned a lot along the way makes it all worth it.

See you next year!

So finally I’m uploading the photos after a day of great news!

First we start with all the people crowded at the hall of the conference room:

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Short answer: yes!

Long answer: read on

At the Unite 2009 conference we just announced that Unity Indie would be discontinued and that a new version of Unity (called just “Unity”) would be made free. Of course this requires some explanation, and since the forums (as well as Twitter and the rest of the interwebs) are aflame with speculation I think I better get started explaining.

Unity Indie no more

Unity Indie was a cool product. It was very featureful, enabling production of rich 3D games and other interactive content for the web and standalone PC and Mac builds too. And it was a commercial product too: it cost $199 and you were explicitly allowed to sell your work and make money with it. This was no “hobbyist” or “noncommercial” license.

But also it’s not been a significant part of our business at all: Unity Pro, Unity Wii and Unity iPhone for the bulk of our (rapidly growing) livelyhood.

However what we liked about Unity Indie was that it allowed many many people to get started with Unity. These people are hobbyists, students, professional and amateur independent developers, as well as teenagers and kids. And many of them are really valuable to the community.

Instead, a free Unity

Today we launched a new product called just “Unity”. It has the same features as Unity Indie had, and the same license (and can thus be used commercially). The only difference will be that it’s free of charge. No time limits, no trials. Just a registration and a download, and you’re good to go.

This new product won’t do anything funky or strange. There’s no forced advertising, there’s no new requirements to share your revenue with us, and there’s no “crapware” or “adware” installed with it.

Indie customers, expect an email from us

Secondly, we understand that people who recently bought Unity Indie might feel really unlucky. Every single Unity 2.x Indie license owner will be offered to upgrade to Unity Pro or to add Unity iPhone Basic to their license for a big discount. And everyone who bought Unity Indie in the last sixty days are alternately being offered full refunds if they don’t wish to upgrade.

These emails are going out in the next couple of days so please bear with us while we’re inundated with excitement and while we try not to make our severs overheat

Feel free to discuss this here or on the forums (http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=34991), and we’ll try to answer your questions although we are also really busy at the conference (it’s awesome by the way, so many great people).

UPDATE: A few people asked if this move had anything to do with our new investors. It’s a fair question, but we had been thinking about this much longer. However when we told them, they were very supportive of the idea.

UPDATE 2: Thanks for the comments. A few questions have been asked repeatedly here and in our forums, so I addressed them here.

As the sun rises over San Franciso we’re gearing up for another exciting day at Unite 2009. Yesterday was a new experiment for us in having a day of classes added on to the conference and from what I saw it was a huge success. In one room we had a “Unity for Unity Developers” track with three 2-hour classes taught by our in-house experts (Nicholas, Aras, Joachim and Lucas) and so far the feedback forms show that folks learned a lot. At the same time in another room we had a “Unity for Flash Developers” track that featured four speakers (myself included) delivering one-hour sessions introducing Flash developers to Unity. The speakers were me, John Grden (engineer on Papervision3D), Paul Tondeur (author of a book about Papervision3D) and Mauricio Longoni (noted Unity community member already). All the sessions were great and the word around the conference was all positive.

Today we’re back to our “normal” agenda, three days of technical sessions. The view above is what I was lucky enough to take in while sipping my coffee outside the event center this morning at 7:30am or so. I’m strangely sleeping too little yet extremely amped up with energy. The vibe and excitement from everyone in attendance is great and it’s only going to get better. In 45 minutes the keynote starts and then day #2 begins… Here we go!

For those who couldn’t come or those who didn’t know, today was the first day of Unite 09, everything was great!

Still we had some minor technical issues with the Internet, but we finally handled them.

So on this first day, here are some photos:

The Unity Conference entrance.

Read the rest of this entry »

So, a bunch of us are busy getting everything ready for Unite – check out this people of guys who’s responsible for doing the conference visuals. It’s a pretty sweet setup (and this is just whatever gear they could fit in their hand luggage).

The projection image on the wall is the final result of camera input and the presenter slides which will get liveedited to a separate machine. They’re mixing everything in realtime using modul8 vj software.

We’ll also be color-keying in the conference visuals with our slides. Cool stuff – I just hope it doesn’t crash…

With such a rapidly growing community and user base behind Unity it’s become increasingly difficult to keep tabs on all the developer blogs, cool content, all the new 3rd party tutorial and learning sites and all the new community-focused forums/social networking groups that are popping up. To help keep tabs on all that we thought it would help to get a few reddit.com pages up for all to use! The pages are moderated, meaning anyone can submit but a Unity Tech moderator must approve all links before they’ll appear, but the lists are out there and open to submissions so jump in, add some links and of course vote stuff up or down so we can all see what’s new and popular!

Unity Blogs
http://www.reddit.com/r/unity_blogs/

Unity Community Sites/Social Networking Groups
http://www.reddit.com/r/unity_sites/

Unity Games
http://www.reddit.com/r/unity_games/

Unity Tutorials
http://www.reddit.com/r/unity_tutorials/

These are not the be-all and end-all of our company efforts to keep track of what’s going on in the community, but it’s a great solution for us all to work with and contribute to in the meantime. If you have any links to suggest then please go submit them now! If you have any other page ideas (other reddit.com pages we should have) then please suggest those as well, either by commenting in response to this blog post or by contacting me directly.

By now many folks are aware of the fact that Will Goldstone has written a book about Unity, it’s called Unity Game Development Essentials and it’s being published by Packt Publishing. Early on Will and his publisher graciously shared PDF copies with folks, including everyone on the Unity Community Forums. While it was extremely exciting to know that a book was in the works, then available in electronic form, I have to admit that the best moment of all came today when a brown box was delivered to my desk for me to open. I’m the guy that handles incoming mail and packages sent to the San Francisco office so it wasn’t unusual for me to have a “present” to open today. When I cracked open the box I found a nice surprise inside, the three copies of Will’s book I’d long ago ordered had finally arrived!

So for those that don’t know about it, consider this your heads up to check it out! It’s a book geared towards the beginner end of the spectrum and from what I’ve read so far (a fair chunk of the PDF already) he did an excellent job of laying things out for those of you just getting into Unity. If you’re interested give it a look on either the Packt Publishing site or over on Amazon.com:

Unity Game Development Essentials (Packt Publishing)
Unity Game Development Essentials (Amazon.com)

Kudos, and a huge thanks, to Will Goldstone for the effort, I know he put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into this book and it shows. Well done Will!