The winners of the  Kongregate Unity Game Contest have been found!

The Kongregate Unity Game Contest with prizes worth a total of $25.000 is over and the winners have been selected. Click on any of the game titles to play them at Kongregate!

Grand Prize ($10,000)

Antimatiere by Chronodrax
This game didn’t get a lot of gameplays on the site prior to the contest ending, but was a huge hit with the judges. The 3D projected onto 2D gameplay mechanics were extremely clever, fun, and original, and catapulted Antimatiere to our top spot.

Second Prize ($5.000)

Sarah’s Run (preview) by SophieHoulden
The audience favorite, and one of the first Unity games on Kongregate, Sarah’s Run combined smooth graphics with fun gravity defying gameplay into a very cool 3D platformer.

Third Prize ($3.000)

Aurora by limbo_cow
This game did a great job using the Unity engine to zoom in and out of a huge solar system down to individual planets. The gameplay was creative and relaxing, and just oozed a cool ambiance.

Fourth Prizes ($1,000 each, in alphabetical order)

Bullseye (Interstellar Marines) by ZeroPointSoft
This was probably the single most polished, high-production game we saw. It would be easy to mistake the sound, music, and graphics of Bullseye with a new console game, which was very impressive.

Drillboid by capnbubs
Combining slick graphics with tight controls and fun mining-style gameplay, Drillboid offers a great package of quality fun that really leverages Unity for some cool effects and visuals.

QBCube by CatStatic
QBCube utilizes clean and simple graphics to present a challenging and fun gravity-swap puzzle game.

Sanctioned Renegades by Sanctioned
There were a number of multiplayer first person shooters, but this one was the clear audience winner in that category, offering a fun capture-the-hill style of gameplay and cool destructible terrain.

Save Toshi by uvmarko
Oh Toshi, she has to dance, but has forgotten how to walk! This tongue-in-cheek phuzzle (physics puzzle) has great graphics, cool physics, clever puzzles, and some hilariously over-the-top dialog that lovingly mocks anime characters. It was a sleeper hit among the judges, producing lots of laughs while still being challenging.

Sentinels: First Wave by RElam99
We saw a few tower defense games in the competition, but Sentinels offers some creative new ideas that take advantage of the Unity engine (first-person towers anyone?) and innovate on the very crowded genre in general. Make sure you play through the tutorial – this is a complex and different game, but worth digging into.

Zombie Minesweeper by Frogtoss
Truly a well-named game. It’s minesweeper, with zombies, and absolutely lives up to that concept. Smooth, clean graphics, a clever concept, and quick, accurate controls bring minesweeper to life with the undead.

Thanks to everyone who participated, and congratulations to all the winners!

Submit a Unity game to Kongregate by Feb. 15, 2011 and you can win $10,000!

Kongregate is now finally open for Unity games! To celebrate, we’ve teamed up to bring you a development contest with prizes totaling $25,000! You are free to create any type of game developed with Unity that you choose so be creative and have fun with it!

Game Contest Announcement at Kongregate and at Unity

Kongregate Unity Game Contest Official Rules

The 25 highest-rated entries will automatically become finalists, winners will be judged based on creativity, innovation, use of Unity, and how fun they are to play.

• 1st Place: $10,000
• 2nd Place: $5,000
• 3rd Place: $3,000
• 4th-10th Place: $1,000 each

Submissions must be integrated with the Kongregate Statistics API as of the end of the contest period. Check out the Kongregate Developer Center and the Kongregate Bindings unitypackage we have made.

Kongregate is a leading social gaming destination and community for core gamers representing the fast-growing free-to-play gaming market. Currently Kongregate hosts 10 million monthly players who spend a combined 23 million hours per month on the site, which places it among the most popular online gaming sites.

You just got a new audience. Now get your game out to them!

Well, the videos from Unite ’09 ended up not coming out quite as soon as we had originally planned, but the good thing is that we’ve been able to improve the demo in the meantime. I’ve been spending some Fridays improving it from a pure tech demo to a small game with actual gameplay. Shoot the hovering orb repeatedly to make it break and go into a frenzy before finally exploding! Give it a go (click the image to go to the live demo):

Can you take down the Orb at the insane difficulty level?

Besides demonstrating animation techniques, the demo is also a complete game with gameplay, particles, physics, ragdolls, pause game handling, and more.

To learn more about how this demo was done, grab the 3rd Person Shooter example project and watch the video of the Character Animation Tips & Tricks presentation from Unite ’09.

Some of our users have expressed concern that the higher volume of posts will make the forums less valuable. Specifically, they are concerned about the growing stream of new users who are thirsty for basic Unity knowledge and ask basic questions that have maybe been asked and answered many times before.

We understand the concern, and we want to support a more efficient way of asking questions and getting answers. This is why we have launched UnityAnswers.

UnityAnswers is our new community site for asking questions and getting answers about Unity. To quote the UnityAnswers FAQ:

UnityAnswers is a place for asking questions and finding answers – all about Unity! UnityAnswers co-exist with the Unity Forums, but they have different functions:

• UnityAnswers is a place for questions that can be answered! Avoid asking questions here that are subjective, argumentative, or require extended discussion.
• Unity Forums is a place for discussions, opinions, showing off your work, getting feedback, and general community chatter.

Why is UnityAnswers better than the forums for getting answers to questions?

Because we’ve seen it work on Stack Overflow.

It allows for people to vote on answers, making the best ones float to the top. You can vote up good questions and helpful answers so they float to the top, while off-topic questions and less helpful answers are listed lower. No more golden tips buried on page 5 of a thread! The person who asks a question can also mark a specific answer as the accepted answer.

It’s easier to find existing questions and answers. The search function is actually good. A great feature is that when you want to post a new question, you will be shown a list of possibly related existing questions as soon as you start typing your question title. Maybe the question has already been asked before and you can just go see that one. If an existing question is the same as you were having, be sure to vote it up! If it has an answer that is also helpful to you, vote that answer up as well.

People who are more trusted by the community get more power! Besides making the best questions and answers float up, the voting system also grants reputation points to you whenever other people vote up your questions or answers. Reputation you can interpret as “how much does the community trust you”. The more reputation points you get, the more things you are allowed to do. (See the FAQ for details.) At the high end of this reputation spectrum there is little difference between users with high reputation and moderators. That is very much intentional. We don’t run UnityAnswers. The community does.

What does this mean for the Unity Forums?

The Unity Forums will co-exist with UnityAnswers. The forums are great for discussions and chat, so we’ll keep them all. Some of the forums will be completely unaffected, such as Announcements, Collaboration, Gossip, and Showcase.

However, for some of the forums, we hope that the use pattern will change. The forums Unity Support, Scripting, UnityGUI, Multiplayer Networking, iPhone Development, ShaderLab, and External Tools are primarily about questions and answers, so we hope that a large chunk of the volume in those will move to UnityAnswers instead.

Here’s what you can do to help:

Use UnityAnswers! If you have questions, ask them there instead of on the forums. If you don’t have questions, you can still help the community by browsing UnityAnswers regularly and see if there are any questions you can answer (which will also earn you reputation).

Direct others to UnityAnswers! If you see a question in the forum and you know the answer, rather than answering the question directly in the forum, try to answer it at UnityAnswers and link to there.

• If a similar question already exists at UnityAnswers, just link to that. (The search works nicely!) If it’s already answered, great! You don’t have to. If not, you can post your answer there.
• Otherwise you can just create the question there – you can even copy the question from the forum directly. After that, you can answer the question yourself, which is perfectly ok.

We know this is a bit more work short-term, but think of the long-term benefits! Your answer will be much easier to find at UnityAnswers than in the forums. It won’t be buried and never found again after a few months.

UnityAnswers is still very new and we’re in the process of getting properly used to it, but we already like it quite a bit and we hope you will too! To login, you can use any OpenID provider, or use your forum account. On the login page, just click on the Unity logo.

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!

How To Use And Abuse The Gaming Press And How The Gaming Press Wants To Use and Abuse You.
Kieron Gillen has written an excellent article on how to get your game in the gaming press – from the insider point of view of a gaming press journalist.

The secret is that we actually want to write about you. When someone has a phenomenal amount of work to do before the nineteen day clock ticks down to deadline, anyone able to present them something interesting to fill their pages saves them an amount of work. While games writers try to stay aware of what’s happening in the games scene, and will go after anything that attracts their attention, by going after the games press you hugely increase your chance for favourable coverage.

The Idiot’s Guide to Marketing Your Indie Game
Michael Rose, one of the editors at indiegames.com, has written the perhaps most straight article on how to market your indie game, with focus on how to get it featured in blogs and magazines.

Nitty gritty time it is. In this guide, I’ll be explaining exactly what it is you, the budding games developer, should be providing me, the eager games journalist, with.

Building Buzz for Indie Games
Paul Tayler has written an article on how to build buzz that discusses such things as building a following around your game, writing a good press release, doing maintenance and keeping momentum post-release, doing previews and release hype, and how to handle reviews. Some things in the article should be taken with a grain of salt, but there are a lot of good bits in there.

Marketing anything takes a lot of time and effort. Most small indies skew their efforts far too far towards production and away from marketing: this is one of the reasons why so few are a genuine commercial success, and why many high-quality games generate minimal revenue.

The Zero Budget Indie Marketing Guide
Rodain Joubert has written an article on marketing targeted at small indie teams. He writes about being visible in the indie games community, the importance of a nice presentation of your game in trailer videos and announcements, getting feedback from players, and about the importance of knowing the game media.

This guide is for anybody who has a nice game under their belt and wants to give it some more exposure. It doesn’t matter if you’re just a two-bit dev submitting simple concepts to some backwater forum. In fact, it’s probably better if you are: this article is geared towards you, and can help you make the most of something that would otherwise disappear into the murky undercity of the Internet.

Forums
An easy way to increase your exposure in the indie community is to participate in the various forums dedicated to indie game development.

Unity Forums
The Unity forums are of course the best place to discuss Unity game development specifically. The community is very friendly and helpful.

Indie Gamer Forums
The Indie Gamer Forums have forums for anything from announcements and portfolios to business, game design, and indie lifestyle. Also follow the blog.

TIGSource Forums
TIGForums have forums dedicated to GDC, TIGJams, announcements, the quirky TIGSource competitions, and more. Also follow the blog.

Don’t Forget us when You’ve Become Rich and Famous…
One last thing – for a long time, Unity became increasingly popular, largely without a marketing budget, dependent mostly on word of mouth and presence in the indie community, much like the techniques described above. Here at Unity Technologies, it always gives us a warm fuzzy feeling when people mention in announcements, press releases, interviews, or other public communications that they used Unity to make their game. Nobody is obligated to do this, it just makes us happy when people help spread awareness of Unity. In the end it also gives us even more resources (mentally and financially) to keep making Unity even better and provide top notch support.

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.

Detonator for Unity makes incorporating good explosions easier for all types of developers. At its most basic level, Detonator is a component that can be attached to any GameObject. At runtime it then creates an explosion with configurable color, size, duration, detail, and sub-elements like sparks, smoke, and shockwaves. For those that want to dig in a bit, Detonator is an explosion framework. Customize each sub-component or create new ones if you want to write a bit of code. Tweak detail levels with a single parameter and save your favorites to prefabs… or dynamically link color to damage type and size to damage amount!

Test out the explosions generated with Detonator for yourself below. Click to start the webplayer:

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

If you’re doing explosions in your Unity game, Detonator can probably help you create good looking, scalable effects in less time!

Get the Detonator Parametric Explosion Framework from our Resources section and populate your own game with spectacular explosions. If you’d like to follow the continued development, check out Ben’s site at http://variancetheory.com.

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.

Itʼs perhaps important that I emphasize the realtime aspect. This is not a tool for preparing pre-rendered scenes, as pretty as they can be. The visual quality of the scene will depend on the player’s hardware just as the rest of the game does. There are both advantages and disadvantages to this approach, but as some famous man once said, “realtime is the only time. For real.”

How’s It Going?
With not much more than a week to go, development of the Cutscene Editor is going well. It isn’t done yet (ha, I wish!), but with a few more late nights and a bit of fairy magic it will be.

In its current state the basics of creating a cutscene are there. You can add a bunch of camera shots, toss them on the timeline, throw in a few explosion animations here and there, maybe chuck in some heavy metal background music, and it will play as expected when you call scene.PlayCutscene().

Where a lot of works needs to be done before the August 31st deadline is the ease by which the developer using the editor can modify the timing of clips on the timeline. Initially thereʼs going to be two tools: the multi-purpose trim-n-drag for moving clips around, and the razor blade for splitting clips into two. Right now these donʼt really work. Neither does the preview window, an arguably essential part of the editor. So itʼs not quite in a “gee willikers, it just works!” stage, but once these features are implemented and a bit more polish added itʼll be close to the original vision.

Golly, Do Tell Me More!

Above is a screenshot of the Cutscene Editor in its current incarnation. There are four main panes: options, media, effects, and the timeline. The editor introduces some concepts blatantly stolen from the film world.

• Shots: a cameraʼs view in a limited amount of time; an animation can be attached to replicate moves like dolly or crane shots
• Actors: animated game objects
• Audio: dialog, sound effects, background music
• Subtitles: captions that transcribe the current dialog/narrative

For clarityʼs sake, each track can only hold a particular media type. That is, you canʼt throw a camera shot onto the same track as an audio clip. The timeline can be zoomed in when precision editing is desired. Clips are added to the track by clicking the “Insert” button beside each piece of media, which will place them with their default time at the position of the playhead. Drag and drop ability was desired, but at this point it may not happen. Version 1.1 perhaps?

For the most part it should feel intuitive. I referred extensively to how the interface of Final Cut Pro works, so those coming from a video editing background should feel right at home.

Challenges
Most of my time has been spent building the user interface. Anyone who has used Unityʼs GUI system knows that it’s not a drag-and-drop affair; every label and button is created in code. This works great most of the time, but creating an editor as customized as a timeline has been difficult. Creating a basic GUI is smooth sailing, don’t get me wrong, but there was no documentation on how to, say, draw a line over the timeline to appear as a playhead. It has certainly been a learning experience.

Despite the challenges, I’m blown away by how extensible the Unity editor is. It completely rocks being able to build my own tools so easily, and I plan to continue working on similar projects in the future.

The ultimate goal for a parametric explosion system?

Ben Throop is working on Detonator – a Parametric Explosion System

Great explosions can make a game. Bad explosions can ruin a game. As important as they are, they are difficult to do well because they are composed of art and complex behavior that’s not easily consolidated into a single object. Explosions also have a high degree of randomness, yet within a domain that is not easily described and is often violated.

That said, Unity developers of all types could make great use of a system that allows for efficient creation and iteration of explosion effects.

For artists, the system will provide a means to harness and iterate on complex behavior that is normally hidden behind coding barriers. Artists can think in terms of “size” and “intensity” of the explosion as a whole, while also drilling down to tweak details. Detonator is more than just a collection of particle emitters.

For programmers, creating an explosion with great visual quality will no longer hinge on finding pre-existing particle libraries or an artist friend. Detonator will provide solid results from the start. It will also allow easier binding of game logic to explosion parameters by providing meta-parameters that combine several emitters, models, lights, into a single “Intensity” or “Duration” value.

Sándor Moldán is working on an Erosion Tool for Realistic Terrain Generation

The aim of this project is to provide Unity artists and level designers with a set of intuitive and simple-to-use tools which they can use to create realistic terrain directly within the Unity Editor by adding the effects of natural erosion to terrain objects.

These tools will include a set of ‘wizard’ style filters which will perform erosion on the entire terrain object and a set of brushes which allow the user to erode a smaller section of the terrain with a greater degree of control. Both the erosion filters and brushes will include a selection of different erosion types which can be applied to the terrain object, including thermal, hydraulic, tidal, glacial and wind erosion.

In creating these tools, particular attention will be given to the kind of landforms that create good gameplay and how natural erosion can help to achieve this. For example, a heavily hydraulically eroded terrain will have large areas of flat land, broken up by steep impassable areas, which is vastly more playable and interesting from a level design perspective than a continuous jagged terrain.

An additional tool will be included with the project which will allow users to texture a terrain object by automatically generating splatmaps based on the height and slope of the terrain.

Matthew Miner is working on a Cutscene Editor

Creating cutscenes in Unity, while not necessarily difficult for the seasoned developer, can be a challenge for those more familiar with traditional filmmaking tools and techniques. As game projects grow larger, it’s likely that trained filmmakers — cinematographers, editors, etc. — will assist with the creation of these cutscenes. Currently there’s no simple system for working with elements like multiple shots and transitions; that is, there’s no easy way to “cut together” a scene.

The solution is a Cutscene Editor, a tool for Unity with the ability to “capture” an animated scene from multiple viewpoints and edit it together. These individual clips are placed in a timeline similar to those seen in non-linear editors like iMovie and Final Cut. Clips can be rearranged, trimmed, split, slowed down, sped up, and given special effect filters like sepia tone. Transitions like crossfades can be added between clips as well as title cards and subtitles. Dialogue and sound effects can be added on their own section of the timeline. Ideally a developer can create a cutscene without writing any code.

Michał Mandrysz is working on a Tool for Transferring VRay Scenes into Unity

It’s amazingly simple to make a scene in Unity. Just drag and drop whatever you want to the scene, drag materials and textures to it and your scene is done. That’s a pretty neat workflow, but you hit some problems if you want your Unity authored scene to be lightmapped.

This project will integrate Unity even more tightly with 3ds Max software, and whatever of its renderers you want to use (like VRay). It should give designers the power to create photo-realistic Mirrors-Edge like scenes with less effort, while being able to author scenes in Unity instead of in 3ds Max.

(Proposals above have been trimmed and in some cases slightly rephrased.)

We are all excited to follow the development of these projects over the next six weeks. Good luck guys!

First a tech demo video to set the context:

As can be seen, the looking behavior works regardless of which animations are playing. (One problem though is that when the two hands are holding the gun together, they are not always properly coordinated, but that’s a problem to solve another time!)

Use Cases
When two characters in a game are talking together (one of which might be a player avatar) they can look at each other to make the interaction look more sincere.

When the avatar comes near a health pack, a weapon that can be picked up, or another important item, he could look at that item. Besides looking natural, this can also make the player more attentive to the item if she hadn’t noticed it herself.

When there’s nothing of particular interest nearby, simply making the character look around at different random points in space looks much more natural than just looking straight ahead. It can also express mood – if the character looks around only at points directly in front, he is probably pretty focused, while if he looks around to the sides and behind him too, he is probably more exploratory or searching around.

Head Look Controller
In between the main things we’re working one here at Unity, we sometimes get to do some projects on the side. In order to make it simple to make a character look at any point in space without requiring extra animations, I have made a head look controller script component as such a side project:

Head Look Controller example project

Head Look Controller (script only) at Unify Community Wiki

This script can be used to make a character look towards a specified point in space, smoothly turning towards it with for example the eyes, head, upper body, or whatever is specified. Multiple ranges of bones can be specified, each with different settings for responsiveness, angle constraints etc.

In the video above the controller on the character is set up with one range of bones for the spine and one for the neck and head. Unfortunately the eyes of that character can’t turn, but that could be set up as well with an appropriately rigged character.

Segments should always be specified with the bones/transforms closest to the root specified first and the ones deeper in the skeleton specified after that.

Here’s the settings I used in for the component:

I have set the Threshold Angle Difference for the spine to 30, since the spine shouldn’t turn if the target angle (the angle between the direction towards the target and the direction straight ahead) is less than 30 degrees. The Bending Multiplier control how much the segment bends or turns compared to how big the target angle is. The segment will attempt to be no more than Max Angle Difference away from the target angle, though it won’t bend any further once it reaches the Max Bending Angle.

I set the responsiveness of the head segment higher than that of the upper body, since people tend to turn the head quicker. If segments had been specified for the eyes as well, they should have had an even higher responsiveness.

I specified the left and right arm under Non Affected Joints, so that the arms keep keep pointing in the original direction despite the bending and turning of the upper body. By setting the Effect to 0.3 I let them be affected a little bit though.

The Head Look Vector and Head Up Vector are just used for reference to know the default alignment of the head. Per default they are set to forward (0,0,1) and up (0,1,0) respectively.

The Target point that the character should look at is specified through scripting.

“Pro Tips!”
I said above that a character could look around at random points when there’s nothing else to look at. Actually, looking around at a few different points looks more natural in any case. Even when talking to a person or when having found an important object, people rarely tend to stare incessantly at the same point. Introduce more variation by looking at the main point of interest most of the time, but look away at some random points in space now and then.

And if your character supports it, don’t forget to blink once in a while! That is super-easy to do, either with a procedural script or with a traditional animation that only affects the eye-lids and which plays all the time at a higher layer than the other animations. Blinking a bit can really help make a character look less artificial, so if the eyes of a character are ever seen in your game, it’s worth spending the small amount of time it takes to implement.

Go on! Make those characters more believable!

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:

The Locomotion System was also presented at last year’s Unite conference:

Besides the Unite conference presentation, the Locomotion System was also presented at GDC 2009 in a fully packed session.

Recently it has been used in the online game Robin Hood Showdown accompanying BBC’s popular television series. The system allowed the characters in the game to run in arbitrary directions while aiming against the player, while still keeping the number of used animations down, thus helping keeping the web-player size small.

Like Unity itself, the Locomotion System has been designed to be highly flexible, while still being painless to use:

Automatic Adjustment to Uneven Terrain
You want your character to walk on hills, on stairs, over rocks and debris and other small obstacles? No problem. Need your character to face in one direction (let’s say, aiming at something) while walking in another arbitrary direction? Done; no extra work involved. The Locomotion System can automatically adjust animations made for a specific speed and direction on a plain surface to any speed, direction, and curvature, on any surface, including arbitrary steps and slopes.

Full Control of Style
Animators are experts in creating motions with specific styles and personalities. The Locomotion System uses keyframed or motion-captured animations as input and only adjusts them minimally to move the feet correctly in a dynamic and detailed environment.

Full Control of Behavior
Move your character around by any means you desire, be it a CharacterController, a RigidBody, or your own custom movement logic. The Locomotion System simply observes the position, alignment, velocity and rotational velocity of your character and deduces everything from that, along with some raycasts onto the ground. This means the system can be used equally well for player avatars and for AI characters; for third person control, point-and-click control, scripted movement paths, or whatever control scheme you need.

Use With Any Legged Character
The Locomotion System is not just for animating humans. It can be used for just about any character with legs, and indeed the project folder comes with a human, a heron, and a coyote. As can be seen in the videos above the system has also been tested with a bear and a wolf. Give me a holler if you try out the Locomotion System with an animated spider. I didn’t have a spider model myself for testing, but I sure want to see it in action! (Actually, give me a holler no matter what you use the Locomotion System for – I’m interested in seeing where people take it.)

Simple Automagic Setup
If you think that all this advanced tech is complicated or cumbersome to use, you’d be wrong! The Locomotion System features a fully automated motion analyzer that analyzes all the provided animations and figures out the velocity of each and well as the times that the feet lift off the ground and land, and lots of other data that it uses at runtime. All it needs from you is a little help with pointing out which bones constitutes the different legs, and a few other simple details. It can all be specified using drag-and-drop and typing in a few values. No scripting required!

Indie Budget Compatible
Big game studios these days are able to create quite realistic walking and running on uneven terrain, but it typically requires hundreds of animations to pull it off. The Locomotion System takes a different approach and attempt to do much with little. Even with just an idle animation and one walk cycle, you still get walking on any uneven terrain and in arbitrary directions, including turning. You can supply more animations too, if you want, and then the produced motion will look even better. One user used walking and running in 8 directions each, and it looked great. So supply as few or as many animations as you like, and the Locomotion System will take what you have and make the best of it. How’s that for Indie friendly? Oh, and did I mention that the Locomotion System itself is completely free to use in Unity games?

Try For Youreself!
You can take the Locomotion System for a spin yourself, right here! Watch the automatic demo mode or take control yourself. There’s a bunch of visualization options too! Just click the image to load the web-player.

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

Press the Auto-Demo “Off” button to take control yourself. Move the character with the keyboard arrow keys. Optionally, the facing direction can be controlled with the W, A, S, D keys. Hold down shift to walk instead of run. Use + and – keys to speed up or slow down time.

Alternatively, with a game pad, such as an XBox 360 controller, the direction and speed can be controlled precisely with ease, while independently controlling facing direction with the secondary stick.

Download the Locomotion System yourself and see if it might add some extra life to your animated characters!

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

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.

Creativity with using a certain tool is not linked to availability of the source code of that tool. Users of Photoshop don’t complain that they are limited in what images they can create because they don’t have the Photoshop source code, and the same goes for users of 3ds Max or Maya, or most other creative tools.

Unity is not limited to create any particular type of game, and has indeed been used for a huge variety of different game genres. Take a look at our list of notable games made with Unity if you need to be convinced.

How is this variety possible without the source code? While pixels are the core of a bitmap image and polygons and textures are the core of 3D models, the core of games are their rules and game mechanics, and those are implemented in a game by means of programming. Unity uses the Mono framework as the scripting back-end, and games can be programmed in C#, Boo, or Unity’s flavor of JavaScript. Anything you can do in those languages, you can do in Unity through scripting. Combined with Unity’s well designed flexible engine API that lets you manipulate just about anything, this makes it possible to create game rules and mechanics with as much limitless creativity in Unity as images can be created in Photoshop or 3D models in 3ds Max or Maya.

But enough philosophy. Let’s look at a few examples.

Want to implement path-finding in Unity?
At this point, path-finding doesn’t come out-of-the-box with Unity, but it can be implemented through scripting without problems. In fact, a user from the Unity community, AngryAnt, did just that with his Path Project. Not only did he implement path-finding, but he used Unity’s flexible editor GUI API to make editor controls for the path-finding logic that integrates completely and seamlessly into the normal Unity user-interface.

Want to implement inverse kinematics in Unity?
Unity doesn’t have inverse kinematics build-in but it can be implemented quite easily through scripting. Inverse kinematics are used prominently in the Locomotion System for Unity, that lets any animated character with legs walk and run over any uneven terrain, adjusting the movements of the bones in the legs to ensure that the feet step correctly on the ground. This can dramatically improve the realism of animated humans and animals. The Locomotion System is free to use in any Unity project.

Want to integrate Unity with proven MMO server technologies?
The Mono framework lets you write any networking code you like. As an example, Thomas Hentschel Lund has done great work with integrating vanilla Unity with the SmartFoxServer package. Yes, thats the backend powering Club Penguin, one of the biggest MMO for tweens out there. Thomas wrote a few plug-ins to interface with SmartFoxServer, and by exposing the relevant script handles, provided Unity script handles for communicating with SmartFoxServer. The best part? You can just go download it, and use it. You can also read Thomas’ great article in Unity Developer Magazine issue two.

Of course, some people will deliberately keep trying to think of things that might not be easily done in Unity through scripting. Some of those things (such as using external native libraries) can be done in Unity Pro using custom plug-ins – other things cannot, but those things are rarely real-world problems. Also, those things would usually require a major engine rewrite or overhaul to be possible in other engines that do provide the source code per default. Of course, if it turns out that a needed mission critical feature for your game really do require the Unity source code, you can always consider just buying a source code license.

However, before assuming that Unity Indie or Pro is “too limiting” for your game, please take a moment to talk with our sales support or our user community to find out if your desired feature really needs the source code, or, as it is the case for the vast majority of our clients, it can easily be done through scripting.