Archive for October, 2009

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:

Read the rest of this entry »

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!

This past weekend I traveled down to Atlanta, Georgia to speak at SIEGE 2009 (Southern Interactive Entertainment & Game Expo). During my trip I not only got to meet a number of local developers at the conference and our dinner out, but I was also lucky enough to meet Manny (a.k.a. diaomndTearz on the forums/Twitter) and his family (wife and young son). They graciously hosted me for the weekend saving me from another yawner stay at an area hotel. While only a whirlwind 36 hours were spent in town I enjoyed myself quite a bit while spreading the word about Unity. I only got a taste of Atlanta but I liked what I saw and would happily go back any time!

Read the rest of this entry »

We see new games being made with Unity at an ever increasing rate. A lot of them get picked up by the gaming media thanks to the sprawling creativity of our users – others don’t get noticed as much as they deserve.

Unity makes game development accessible to a broad audience, but creating awesome games is not always enough in itself. Luckily, there’s lots of articles and blog posts about how to get games noticed. We have linked to some of the best in this blog post.

One important point raised in several of the articles is that building buzz and making sure your game gets noticed is something you should start doing long before your game is released. So if you’re thinking “Well before I think of spreading awareness I first need to actually make my game LOL”, well, then you’re probably mistaken.

Go on, read on!

Read the rest of this entry »