Archive for February, 2009

I suppose that this may technically be round number 2 as we tried this once already, but we had short notice (even shorter than this round) and only Sam and I were online to play. So let’s call this round 1 and get it right! I’m keen on getting together with the Unity community every so often and playing various games online. For this round we’ll be playing Halo 3 on the XBox 360 but over time we will expand the repertoire to include Unity games, other console games, etc., variety is the spice of life y’know! If you’re interested in playing some time, and you have any specific requests for other games/platforms then feel free to share those in a comment below.

Unity Community Online Gaming: Round 1
Platform/Game: XBox 360 / Halo 3
Date/Start Time: Saturday, February 28th / 10am PST

If you’re interested in playing then please let me know by either adding a comment below or by writing me at tom(at)unity3d(dot)com. When doing so please let me know your XBox Live Gamer Tag as well as your Unity Community Forums handle (if you’re a member). I will update this post with information as necessary.

It’s on!

I remember a long time ago when I first heard of this odd new (at that time) site called Orkut, I readily signed up and started my own person social networking experience. Before long it seemed that Orkut was passe and it was replaced with Friendster. Again I signed up and joined the fray, but I soon grew weary of the experience and dropped off the radar for a bit. Instead of using social networking sites I focused on my own personal website and interest-specific forums for meeting up and interacting with others online. Due to not fully enjoying those early experiences I was slow to get back into things with the advent of LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook and of course one of the newest entrants into the fray, Twitter.

Slowly but surely I succumbed, ultimately signing up for both LinkedIn (here) and Facebook (here) skipping over and avoiding the whole MySpace experience. As of late I’ve come across lots of folks jumping on the Twitter bandwagon and so I figured that it was finally time to give it a go. So today I finally signed up for a Twitter account, feel free to stalk me… err, “follow” me, if you’d like:

http://twitter.com/higgyb

I’m now following a number of folks, many of whome are coworkers at Unity Technologies or members of the Unity Community. Are you on Twitter? Will I follow you next? <insert evil music here>

After a two week visit to Europe I’m now back in San Francisco and settling into my regular work habits once again. My recent business trip had me visiting company headquarters in Copenhagen for one week, then spending most of the second week in Germany attending Casual Connect Hamburg. The conference was great for us as an attending sponsor and for us as geeks in the game industry in general. We spent most of our time either attending to our sponsor table, having specific one-on-one meetings or enjoying lots of social time at various meet-ups and bar events. Through it all we managed to chat up a number of folks, including some existing users, lots of potential new users and a slew of people with various technology of interest to anyone using Unity. I have to offer my thanks to Luke Burtis and Jessica Tams of the Casual Games Association for putting on another fantastic conference!

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Me, Tom Higgins and Joe Santos will be driving off to Hamburg in a couple of hours (and staying through Thursday). See you at our booth at Casual Connect, in Hall G silver table 9.

We’re also hosting a bar meetup on Wednesday night, done in conjunction with the Nordic Games folks. Whether you’re attending the conference or not, join us at Zoé 2 / Sofabar, Neuer Pferdemarkt 17, Hamburg. The event starts at 7:30pm until late.

http://europe.casualconnect.org/

As the Unity community grows larger and attracts a wider range of developer types I’m excited to see a growing number of 3rd party offerings for the developer community at large to use. Some of these are free for all while others come at a price, but in the end they all offer the opportunity to tap into new capabilities not available out of the box (yet). Some of these items solve problems already identified on our road-map, others carve out new areas altogether, but regardless of all that, they’re valuable offerings that everyone using Unity ought to check out. I’ll cite a few here as they’re the latest examples but know that there are many more. Drop by and join the Unity Community Forums and you’ll about ‘em all!

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As most of the Unity universe already knows, we recently announced that Unity 2.5 is coming soon, and that among other new features it will most prominently include Unity editor support on Windows. In case you live in a cave or are otherwise out of the loop with respect to Unity news:

Unity: Coming Soon in Unity 2.5

I think it goes without saying that this has caused an incredible stir amongst the game developer community and it’s caused a lot of new eyeballs to look our way. For those of us working on Unity it’s an incredible time to say the least and all signs seem to indicate that this year’s roller coaster ride is just getting started…

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