Booth

Come by our booth this year and get your badge swiped for a chance to win a license of Unity Pro or Unity iPhone! Our booth is 1,000 square feet (that’s 2.5x larger than last year!) and it is made out of wood, yes wood, and was designed by our friends at Because We Can who are pretty notable in the San Francisco area for doing the offices of game companies like Three Rings, Backbone, and Cryptic. The booth number is 1112, but it’s at the front of the expo hall so you definitely won’t miss it!

The main focus of our booth is to give attendees a hands on experience. To do that we’re going to have three demo machines for giving people a tour of Unity and features they can be looking forward to and we’ve got three demo machines to show off the just-released Unity iPhone 1.6.  We’ll also have lots of great Unity content that people can get their hands on including: an iPhone arcade with four iPod Touches containing the very best Unity iPhone games, a Wii playing the award winning Max and the Magic Marker, a Xbox 360 showing Interstellar Marines, a web arcade showing a variety of Unity web player games, and a FishTish multi-touch table showing off uniTUIO content.

We’ll also be presenting in our booth’s theater and joined by the partners from our Partner Pavilion as well as the uniTUIO guys and Autodesk.

Schedule

Tuesday

Fastest Path from Concept to Top Paid

iPhone Summit, Room 306, 12:30-1:00pm

Tom Higgins, Product Evangelist at Unity Technologies talks about Unity iPhone and why it’s become the dominant middleware solution for content published in the App Store. The presentation will include an overview of the tool and its feature set, the development workflow and a sampling of success stories to highlight what’s possible with the amazing Unity game engine.

iPhone Summit Mixer, Sponsored by Unity Technologies

5:30pm-7:30pm near the iPhone summit room at the back of the hallway

Wednesday

Myspace Tutorial Day: Unity on Myspace

Room 300, South Hall, 10:30-11:00am

Featuring Tom Higgins and A few folks from Cmune who will talk about their experience creating social games with Unity for social platforms like Myspace.

GamesBeat@GDC

Room 305, South Hall, 2:15-3:00pm

Our CEO David Helgason will participate in a pannel on Disruptive Innovation

OpenFeint Party

8:30-12:30

We’re the drink sponsor at the OpenFeint party

Thursday

Expo floor opens.

IGF/Game Developers Choice Awards

North Hall, Hall D, 6:30pm

Friday

Session: Intro to Unity for People Who Know What They’re Doing

Room 121, North Hall, 9:00-10:00am

Unity’s Lucas Meijer will give a technical demonstration of Unity’s featureset. He will be joined by Unity’s CTO Joachim Ante, lead graphics engineer Aras Pranckevicius, and technical artist Joe Robins. C++ / C# scripting integration, shader programming, asset pipeline and iphone publishing workflow are among the topics that will be discussed. A must attend session for anyone evaluating engines for their next game.

Expo-only pass holders welcome!

Unity for Engineers

Expo Hall, NVIDIA Booth, 12:00-1:00pm

Saturday

Last day of the show, come by the booth one last time to hear a session you missed or to say goodbye!

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 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

I’m pleased to announce that we released Unity iPhone 1.5.1 yesterday.  Unity iPhone 1.5.1 includes improved XCode support and improved AssetBundle support, but more importantly Native APIs (NSGetEnviron and exc_server functions) have been removed to comply with new Apple requirements, previously reported by Joachim here.

This release also removes the requirement for prospective users to write to our sales staff for an *evaluation copy, you can now just go directly to our download page to try it out for yourself!

For more details about Unity iPhone 1.5.1, please check out the release notes.

*Note: Unity iPhone is currently only for use with Mac OS X and you’ll need to be a registered iPhone developer with the paid version of the SDK to properly evaluate the product.

Using Unity 3D allowed us to have a much more efficient budget, team size and timeline than we would have had if we’d decided to build our own solution from scratch.  Unity was an excellent jumping off point and allowed us to get to a playable prototype in about a month’s time with a team of approximately 5 people.  By the time we launch Tiger Woods PGA TOUR Online, we’d have been working on the project for about a year with a team of about 15-20 developers.

Read the entire interview here.

We’ve got a great presence on this year’s expo floor; you can’t miss it since it is nearly the first thing you see when you walk into the expo (booth #301). There has been a lot of traffic at our booth so far; we gave demonstrations of Unity and answered questions from current and prospective users all day long — we ran out of “large” t-shirts but we have some other sizes on the way!

One of my favorite aspects was hearing user stories and getting feedback directly from our customers; I’m so happy that we’re able to empower these creative teams!

We also had an opportunity to witness a really really really great project that’s being made in Unity… I hear that there will be some sort of press release about the company tomorrow but you’ll have to wait a while to hear any details about the project

If you’d like to check out EA’s Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online or if you’re considering Unity and are at GDC Austin, please come by our booth tomorrow or Friday!