Archive for December, 2009

What a wonderful Christmas present!

So, 2009 has been an amazing year. I won’t list out all our achievements, but they’ve been many, and some big enough that achieving just one of them would have made us very proud.

But just in time for the Holiday season, Unity Technologies has been selected as one of the 5 top gaming companies by Game Developer Magazine. According to them, this puts us in a pretty interesting family of Apple, Epic, Valve and Zynga. A cute detail is that we’re by far the smallest. And (apart from Zynga) also the youngest.

Without gushing too much I want to thank you my incredible colleagues (who worked so hard to make this all happen) and our users for this.

Both groups have more than tripled this year, so there’s a constant stream of new faces, new histories and backgrounds, and of course amazing new skills being added to the mix. I guess that part is what makes me love my job the most.

Thanks.

Today we’re excited to have released Unity Asset Server 2.0! This is a free update for all existing users of the Unity Asset Server and it offers the following new features:

• The Unity Asset Server can now be hosted on Windows! (in addition to Mac OS X and Linux as before)
• The Unity Asset Server can now be hosted on Debian-based Linux distributions as well.
• The Unity Asset Server now uses an updated version of PostgreSQL.
• When used with Unity 2.6 (and later) the Unity Asset Server now offers faster check-in times.
• There are tools to help simply the backup and restoration of Asset Server databases.

If you’re interested in reading more about the Unity Asset Server or the 2.0 release in particular then please use the following links:

Press Release
Unity Features: Unity Asset Server
Download the Unity Asset Server
Unity Asset Server Guide

Enjoy!

There’s a lot to learn about Unity, much of which can be accessed through our support page, but it can be a little daunting to know where to start.

I personally think that the two PDFs that come with Unity are a great place to start. They are: 1 – GUI Essentials.pdf and 2 – Scripting Tutorial.pdf and they can be found in the Tutorial folder in your Unity installation folder on your hard drive.

Community member tonyd’s Newbie guide to Unity Javascript is a great introduction to programming for novice programmers.

Experience programmers new to Unity will definitely want to check out our MonoBehaviour scripting reference which is a one stop cheat sheet for the base class every script derives from.

We also provide some introductory video documentation but there have been some really high quality videos popping up on the internet that I wanted to showcase.

Jason Busby and Zach Parrish of 3D Buzz just released a series of 29 videos detailing many aspects of Unity game creation. This series is a C# remake of the UnityScript based Unity Jump Start series created by Casey Jones.

Infinite Ammo’s Alec Holowka of Paper Moon and Aquaria fame has recently been creating a series of Infinite Ammo Unity tutorials as well. I really like Alec’s way of explaining not only how to use Unity but best practices in game programming. The picture in picture effect is also nice and adds a lot more personality to the whole viewing experience.

Will Goldstone’s video tutorials have also been a mainstay in the community and were the foundation for his book. They do a great job of covering the ins and outs of the terrain tool and give a good overview of the particle editor and some simple gameplay examples.

The news, the great news, just keeps on coming! Recently the folks at Kongregate.com announced their new Konduit Platform and one of the cool benefits of that news is that they are now open to non-Flash game content, and that of course means they’re open to Unity content! While it’s always cool to read about new possibilities, nothing speaks louder than action and so hot on the heels of the Konduit announcement was the recent acceptance of not one but two Unity titles on their site! The Unity games that are now live are Big Fun Racing and Bubble Bang, both of which come from Decane/Martin Schultz. Now that Martin and Kongregate.com have paved the way for others to follow, who’s next?

If you’re keen on giving it all a look for yourself then here are a few important links:

Kongregate.com

Kongregate.com’s Developer Center

Kongregate.com’s Konduit Platform

Once more, kudos to Martin for leading the way and props to Kongregate.com for opening their doors to a variety of technologies. That open door is good for us as a tech provider just as much as it is for game players wanting diverse game types/genres. Exciting times to say the least!

Hey folks, the end of another incredible year is rapidly coming to a close and the holiday season is fast upon us, and we here at Unity Technologies want to help everyone celebrate with a special end of year discount. Specifically we’re offering everyone the chance to save 20% off of any purchases made in our online store between now and the end of the year. In order to take advantage of this offer you simply need to visit our online store and enter ENDOFYEAR2009 into the rebate coupon field and you’ll save 20%, it’s that easy. You can visit our online store by clicking on the following link:

Unity Online Store

Remember, this end of year discount offer is only valid through December 31st so make sure you take advantage of it before the new year begins!

Apple recently put out their iTunes Rewind 2009, it’s Apple’s way of recognizing the best music, TV, movies and of course iPhone applications and games from this last year. What’s exciting for us is that there are three Unity-authored games found among the best and top selling games lists! Given that awesome achievement I thought it would be cool to take a minute and offer those three games their proper kudos and congratulations.

Best Games of 2009
There are two Unity-authored games found on the best games list for 2009, those are:

Ravensword: The Fallen King
Samurai: Way of the Warrior

I know that I’ve played both games and have to agree that they’re both awesome and well worth a look if you haven’t checked them out already!

Top Selling Games of 2009
The top selling games list has yet another Unity-authored game listed, one that most of us have likely heard about long ago as it sat atop the sales charts for some time:

Zombieville USA

Congratulations to everyone that has games out on the AppStore using Unity, but an extra dose of congratulations goes out to the folks above for a job well done. Here’s to hoping we see more of the Unity community listed as part of iTunes Rewind 2010!

The UK Office

Hello everyone!

My first blog post is to announce that our UK office is open and rocking already. There are now five of us working for Unity Technologies from the UK, and we have started recruiting heavily to fill more positions. I will talk about what we are doing at this office in a separate blog post, but put simply we are doing a lot of community, support and QA work here. The office is in a converted convent, at least according to local legend. There is certainly a statue of the Virgin Mary on the end wall of the building. Some of the offices are small and are meant to be where the nuns slept.

Yesterday we had Samantha and Oleg visiting us, so we took a photo to prove to the Danes that we do exist.  Sadly Matt was ill, so the photo only shows 6 of us.

This may not be our final home, but it is convenient for now. As we grow we will look for more permanent and scalable offices. I am thrilled to be involved in the start of this UK arm of Unity Technologies.

Thanks,

Graham

UK office crew — (From left, Oleg, Samantha, Chris, Dave, Graham and Andy).

The fun guys over at PC gaming enthusiast site Rock, Paper, Shotgun are making a RPS themed game, with the help of their community, and detailing their progress along the way:

“Those who don’t read RPS every day might not have noticed we’re making a game using the newly-free Unity development suite. So to explain: twice a week for the next two months I’ll be posting about my experiences with the tools.”

They’ve already made three posts detailing their progress. You can follow along — or even lend a hand — here:

• Rock, Paper, Shotgunity Development Diary
• Rock, Paper, Shotgunity Collaboration Forum

Hey everyone,

We’ve just shipped Unity 2.6.1 out to the world. This release includes a Webplayer that is compatible with 64-bit Safari on Snow Leopard, and fixes for problems affecting terrain trees and some asset importing.  This upgrade is recommended for all users.

You can see all the good stuff here: http://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new/unity-2.6#unity-2.6.1

And download the latest build here: http://unity3d.com/unity/download/

Enjoy!