Posts by Rune Skovbo Johansen

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!

(more…)

This blog post is written by Ben Throop who has been working on a Detonator framework to generate great-looking explosions in Unity games. The project was one of the four selected projects that were selected for the Unity Summer of Code and the first to be wrapped up and released.

Explosions are a really common element in games, but they can be difficult to create. Starting from scratch can be time consuming and requires expertise with particle systems, lighting, texturing, and animation. Tweaking existing effects to fit a game can also be a challenge because its difficult to change the size or color of a set of particle emitters in unison. Making explosions should be fun, fast, and rewarding instead. That’s why Detonator was created.

(more…)

This blog post is written by Matthew Miner who is working on a cutscene editor for Unity. The cutscene editor is one of four selected projects that were selected for the Unity Summer of Code.

As described in an earlier blog post, the Cutscene Editor is a tool for creating realtime cutscenes without touching a script. This allows both veteran Unity developers and those new to the engine to easily toss together a scene without too much fuss. It works similar to modern video editing software like Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere, with a media browser and a preview window and a timeline. Anyone who has ever edited together a movie on their computer will find a familiar user interface which has been designed with ease-of-use in mind.
(more…)

Two weeks ago we announced our Unity Summer of Code program through which we offer indie & student developers the chance to get paid for doing something cool in Unity. Now we have reviewed all of the almost hundred proposals and selected the four of them that we found best matched the program!

The ultimate goal for a parametric explosion system?

(more…)

Just making characters in your game look around can bring them much more to life as well as express important information to the user. Here we’ll discuss a few use cases and present a script that makes it simple to implement in your game.

First a tech demo video to set the context:

(more…)

The Locomotion System for Unity has previously been briefly mentioned on this blog, but this post will go more in depth with what exactly it can do to bring more life to your animated characters.

The Locomotion System is all about making walking and running in games look better and more believable without requiring dozens of animations. The system automatically blends your keyframed or motion-captured walk and run cycles and then adjusts the movements of the bones in the legs to ensure that the feet step correctly on the ground. The Locomotion System is available for free when used in a Unity game.

Video Introduction

The best way to understand what the Locomotion System is all about is by watching a short introduction to it:
(more…)

I always thought that the license comparison page on the Unity website was – well, not confusing, but at least not quite as clear as it could be. That’s why I have spent the last few days creating a new Unity License Comparison table with the help of my colleagues, where the differences can be seen absolutely clearly between Unity Pro, Unity Indie, Unity iPhone Advanced, Unity iPhone Basic, and even Unity Wii.

So if you’re in doubt about which features come with which licenses, head straight to:
Unity License Comparison

More and more people and companies are realizing how Unity can help them unleash their creativity and concentrate on making their games rather than on making their games work. However, some people are still hesitant to try out Unity (despite our free 30 day trial for Mac and Windows) because they think the lack of access to the Unity source code will inherently limit their creativity and only let them create certain types of games. This is a gross misconception.

Myth: The lack of source code access to an engine is limiting in what kind of game it is possible to create.

First of all, it is possible to buy a source code license for Unity (contact us for details), but the vast majority of games don’t need it and can be made using vanilla Unity Indie or Unity Pro.

(more…)