Archive for April, 2008

One of the coolest things about working at a tool company is the chance to see the interesting, innovative and exciting things people do with that tool. This week I got to take advantage of that benefit by visiting the San Jose office of NeuroSky. These folks have developed a group of products based around bio-sensors that pick up on your brain waves and then translate those for use as input in a variety of applications. The idea of “thought based input” appeals to a variety of industries and use cases, whether for medical analysis, development of assistive devices or of course use in next generation game content.

Read the rest of this entry »

People have been asking: why built-in shadows don’t work on Unity’s terrain? (here, here, …) Yes, right now (Unity 2.0.2) they don’t. Why - because we didn’t have time to make them work yet. Both terrain and built-in shadows are new features in Unity 2.0, and those two don’t happen to just work together.

Here’s a glimpse into what is needed to get it working. Read the rest of this entry »

Just had this chat conversation:

…
Joachim: yeah it’s awesome
Joachim: function Start () { /* super secret code snippet */ }
Aras: whoa
Joachim: it rocks
Joachim: automatically instantiates material for you
Joachim: the same way we do it for scripts
Joachim: best thing since sliced bread i think
Aras:
Aras: hey, back in the day the terrain was best thing since sliced bread!
Joachim: sliced bread appears to be always worse depending on what i work on.
Aras: maybe sliced bread is just not so good in fact
Aras: sliced bread is overrated

And no, I won’t say what we were talking about

I frequent many sites to stay up-to-date on various game industry news and today a real gem of an article appeared on Gamasutra courtesy of Daniel Cook and it’s a must read for anyone working in the casual games space:

The Casual Games Manifesto

It’s a relatively brief article that offers some great insights and suggestions to help guide casual game developers to a more profitable future. Specifically he points out some issues (from the developer’s perspective) in the business model offered by most major game portals. But he doesn’t leave it at that, he goes further and offers strategies as to how developers can start taking steps to turn the developer-portal relationship into a tool that offers you, the developer, a bigger (hopefully!) piece of the revenue pie.

Go read it today, it’s worth the 20 minutes or so it will take you to cover the five page (six if you count the appendix) article.

With our recent iPhone announcement having my mailbox boiling over, I’m so happy that I’ll be spending a long weekend in Berlin. I’m flying out to Berlin Wednesday evening to meet up with my whole family – arriving from London, Reykjavik, and Halle – and to celebrate my grandmother’s birthday, eat good food, and have intense conversations about what we are up to.

If course I’ll take the time to meet with a few interesting companies while I’m there – amongst others, people doing hardware instead of software… I’ve met so few of those, it’s going to be exciting to learn about their no-doubt very different business models, and see where Unity can be a fit.

So, anyone else I should be meeting up with? As I’ve written before, the authorized way to meet up in foreign cities is dopplr.com.