Earlier this week iLounge released their 2010 iPod + iPhone Buyer’s Guide and a number of Unity titles are featured in their top games list! For starters you can check it all out at the following URL:

iLounge’s 2010 iPod + iPhone Buyer’s Guide

It’s a rather large (20+MB) download as they provide a ton of material, including their suggestions for top games and applications to purchase if you own an iPod touch or iPhone. But as noted above the exciting point for us is the fact that a number of Unity-authored games are listed in their Top 100 Games of 2009! So to help promote those games and offer them some extra kudos I’ll preempt the download above and list them here in the order they appear in the guide:

Downhill Bowling from Game Resort LLC (page 22)
Downhill Bowling Lite (free)
Downhill Bowling ($2.99)

Vans SK8: Pool Service from Fuel Games (page 23)
Vans SK8: Pool Service Lite (free)
Vans SK8: Pool Service ($2.99)

Battle Bears from SkyVu Pictures (page 27)
Battle Bears Free (free)
Battle Bears ($0.99)

Inkvaders from Chillingo (page 27)
Inkvaders Lite (free)
Inkvaders ($1.99)

10 Balls 7 Cups from Graveck (page 31)
10 Balls 7 Cups ($0.99)

Note: 10 Balls 7 Cups has been rereleased on the AppStore under the name Skee-Ball as well!

Volcano Planet by Jelly Biscuits (page 35)
Volcano Planet Lite (free)
Volcano Planet ($0.99)

A huge kudos to all the developers behind the games above, clearly it’s a job well done and you deserve some recognition for your efforts!

Best Overall
The best overall category is the one in which we recognize the true best-of-breed content for the year and it was a tough task to say the least. There were many titles that came close to being finalists, but ultimately only a few made that final run at the title.

Winner: Max & the Magic Marker, developed by Press Play

Runner Up: Lego Star Wars: Quest for R2-D2, developed by Three Melons

Finalist: Paper Moon, developed by Infinite Ammo
Finalist: Monospace, developed by Nonverbal
Finalist: EnerCities, developed by Paladin Studios

Best iPhone Game
Given the popularity of iPhone/iPod touch games in general, and of course the way in which Unity iPhone has become the dominant middle-ware tool of choice, we felt it truly necessary to recognize the best iPhone games on their own.

Winner: Monospace, developed by Nonverbal

Runner Up: Samurai: Way of the Warrior, developed by Mad Finger Games

Finalist: Snake Galaxy (now being published as Paris Galaxy), developed by DigDog
Finalist: Battle Bears, developed by SkyVu Pictures & Blackish
Finalist: Touch KO, developed by Adam and Matt Mechtley

Best Visual Design
One of the exciting things about a tool like Unity is that it lets you experiment in ways you might not be able to with other tools. The rapid iterative abilities and easy work flow make experimentation easy, and that leads to some incredibly beautiful and unique visuals.

Winner: Doppelscope, developed by Tobias Baumann

Runner Up: Blush, developed by Flashbang Studios

Finalist: Choma, developed by Knife Media
Finalist: Max & the Magic Marker, developed by Press Play
Finalist: Paper Moon, developed by Infinite Ammo

Best Technical Achievement
To go along with rewarding the best visual effort we wanted to recognize those titles that displayed solid technical achievement as there are so many folks out there pushing the technical boundaries with Unity. This category was extra tough as we all have our pet areas of interest with our technology, audio, shading/graphics, game play mechanic and more.

Winner: Blush, developed by Flashbang Studios

Runner Up: Max & the Magic Marker, developed by Press Play

Finalist: Time Donkey, developed by Flashbang Studios
Finalist: Touch KO, developed by Adam and Matt Mechtley
Finalist: Super Volei Brasil 2, developed by Aquiris

Closing Thoughts
As I noted up top there were 129 separate entries at the beta stage and that’s an awesome turn out! I know that not all of you were able to get a final build submitted and certainly not all of you made it into the final judging stage (involved roughly 30 entries), and even fewer of you made it into the top-5 finalist categories. But through it all the hard work and effort the Unity community puts forth to make killer content is a critical component in driving our technology forward. Content is king y’all, and without you I don’t know where our tech would be. So thanks to everyone that participated in this year’s Unity Awards and a huge round of applause and hefty kudos to the finalists, and especially the winners. Rock on!

Wow, Unite 2009 has come to a close and once again it was an awesome/incredible/crazy/you-name-it week! Now that I’ve had a day or so to rest and recuperate a bit I figured I’d take a few minutes and jot down some notes and comments about last week’s event. Read on for my thoughts and post up some comments if you have any questions.

Content is King
We all know the phrase “content is king” when thinking about web technologies like ours*, but I think that also applies to conferences as well. The truth is that without high-quality sessions that offer attendees something valuable, our conference wouldn’t be worth much. The good thing is that I think we offered some incredible sessions this week and that feeling was backed-up by the in-person feedback I received on site. Many attendees indicated to me that they felt that each day offered them material they found interesting and more importantly useful. So for that I have to thank the crew internally at Unity Tech as we had many of us up on stage delivering presentations or assisting attendees during hands-on lab. Additionally I have to thank the awesome 3rd party speakers that showed up to deliver presentations as well, they volunteered their valuable time to help others learn more about Unity and that’s a generous offer to say the least. So, content is king even at conferences and all signs seem to indicate that was the case this year once again.

*If you don’t then know this, it’s an indication that for tech companies like us having great content in production is critical. We can have the greatest tech available but if nobody is using it to make cool stuff then who’s really going to know about it or care? So, “content is king”!

Some Incredible Numbers
This past week offered up some incredible numbers that show how much this conference has grown. Just two years ago we held our first conference, Unite 2007, in San Francisco and were excited that we had something like 80 people in attendance and we offered 11 presentations. Then a year later we held the conference again, Unite 2008 was in Copenhagen and it grew even larger attracting roughly 170 people who were there to take in a total of 15 presentations. So this year we held the conference for the third time, again back in San Francisco and the attendance growth continued once again as we had over 350 people in town to attend 21 presentations and 3 classes, this time over four days (compared to prior years being 3-day events). So we’ve gone from 80 to 170 to 350+, and I say 350+ as we had all 437 seats in the Cowell Theater full for the keynote, but many of those were press/media/guests there for that presentation only, we had 350+ there regularly despite a much higher peak number. Beyond that we offered more hands-on lab, we had a bunch more Unity Awards entries (a separate blog post on that is coming!) and we had a significantly larger Unity Tech employee contingent on site as almost all of our 50+ employees were on site. Simply incredible…

Our Community is Awesome
Once again I have to say that the Unity Community rocks! Not only did members of the community step up and deliver presentations, but a bunch more were simply there in attendance welcoming all the community newcomers that were getting introduced and they were all spending time networking, talking about Unity and sharing what they know. We spent lots of time socializing at the Pre-Unite Monday Night User Meeting, the Wednesday night Unity User Group “Drink & Shoot” Party thrown by the folks at dimeRocker and then once again at the official conference party Thursday night. I spent a ton of time each day at the show talking with forum regulars and community newbies, with lots of Flash users looking to make the jump on up to folks that have been using Unity since before I arrived on the scene. So again this past week showed just how awesome of a community we have and so I thank everyone of you (those that could attend as well as those that could not), y’all truly help make Unity and our Unite conferences something special.

What’s Next?
First up is a bit of rest, then come Monday morning we’ll be back at it as there’s a lot to do. First up will be some website updates to both the Unite pages as well as some information about this year’s Unity Awards finalists and winners. Then we’ll work with the awesome guys from ShiftControl to get the session videos they helped record prepared and posted online in a much faster manner than years prior. Then after that we’ll start looking forward to next year’s event, where it might be held and how many people we might think will attend. Given the progression we’ve seen it could be even crazier next year and without a doubt that’s exciting beyond belief, I can only imagine what it’s going to be like.

One Last Reminder, Thanks To…
The incredible crew from Melons Catering who delivered top-notch food each and every day. The crew at the Fort Mason Center that helped us put on a great show. Everyone at Unity Technologies for an awesome week of hard work, I know we put y’all through your paces so thanks for stepping up! To each and every 3rd party presenter, I know you put in your own time to prepare and deliver those, it’s appreciated. To ShiftControl who came on-site to handle the session recording, putting in some seriously long hours working under lots of stress with nary a sign of cracking. And finally, one last thanks to everyone that was there in attendance, conferences like this take a massive amount of work, induce mountains of stress and likely age us prematurely, but knowing that y’all enjoyed the week and that you learned a lot along the way makes it all worth it.

See you next year!

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!

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!

The conference ran Friday to Sunday, but we were only there one day and that was Saturday. After breakfast Manny and I made our way down to the conference so we could arrive in time to attend a session before we were to speak in a session of our own. The session we attended was one about serious games in corporate training, while it was all great information it was nothing too shocking to me although I’m sure many in the games industry would benefit from hearing it (it’s a great market for your talents folks!). What did surprise me though was that the room was small, and I mean tiny, and it was hot hot hot, making me sweat within minutes of entering. Manny and I sent texts back and forth that we each hoped our room would be different, luckily it was.

After attending that one session we went to the room where ours would be held, it was much larger and the temperature was set quite a bit cooler, no worries there. The time for our session arrived and nobody was in the room, I had that moment of worry, “really?” It was just the volunteer working the door who hadn’t started letting folks in, soon enough the room was almost completely full (holding something like 100+ people in all). My session was a panel discussion with myself and four Unity developers as the panel and Manny as the moderator. He led us through over an hour’s worth of chatter about Unity, covering topics from pricing/licensing to our art asset pipeline and on to platform support and product directions. Through it all the crowd, 1/3 of whom said they’d at least tried Unity before, was very engaged and we were actually forced to leave the room as we were running too far over (sorry about that!).

Our session room, all these chairs would soon be full…

Following my session I sat in the hallway talking with a number of folks, some that thanked me as they’d just never heard about Unity while others thanked me as they’d already jumped on board and just loved the tool. Of course I had a few folks that wanted to ask the tougher questions, ones about our lack of a proper debugger, complaints about the lack of Linux support or others poking about source/version control solutions. All of them were easily handled as I think we’ve got a solid story to tell and features on the way. All told it was a great day of talking to a few existing users and hopefully a whole bunch of potential new ones. I know that in the day or two since that presentation I’ve already received a number of emails from folks wanting more information, I suppose that means the conference was a success. I’ll say well done to Manny for putting together a great panel!

What conference is worth attending if you don’t go out at least once? The guys in Atlanta didn’t disappoint as they took me out to the Vortex Bar & Grill and my oh my it was delicious! The burgers were huge and tasty, the drinks strong and the company entertaining.Over burgers & drinks we talked shop and a bit about life, travels and the world around us, all in all it was an awesome evening. I had driven there with Manny and his wife and due to my early flight the next morning we cut out early, picking up their son on the way home. Sure I had an early flight but we weren’t done, we went to their house for a rousing evening of Rock Band. Manny and I took the guitar and bass, his wife rocked the drums and his son sang, and man he sang his little heart out! We rocked out, eventually putting their son to bed (a late night for him!) and soon enough, ourselves. Once again I have to say thanks to them for making it a great weekend, hanging with the family was much better than a boring couple of nights in a hotel!

Good times at Vortex!

All too soon it was early Sunday morning and the alarm was going off. I dragged myself out of bed, showered and got ready so Manny could drive me to the MARTA train for a brief ride to the airport, then a long day of travel home. With some travel delays my travel time home was over twelve hours, and yet somehow I arrived while my suitcase went to New York. Oh well, I can live for a few days without the dirty laundry…

I’d love to go back to SIEGE next year, or just back to Atlanta to hang out with the developers in the area. Thanks again for the great weekend, it makes evangelizing Unity a pleasure!

PS: A big huge thanks goes out to Manny (and his family!) for not only helping get the panel group together at all, but for being such an awesome host. He picked me up on Friday, fed me delicious home grilled steaks that same night, drove me around on Saturday and got up in the wee hours on Sunday to get me off to the airport. He and his family made me feel welcome in their home I had a great time hanging out with them and cannot say thanks enough!

We’re happy to announce that tickets to this year’s Unite ‘09 conference are now on sale! This year’s event is a bit different than the prior two years as there is now an optional lead-in day of classes that folks can attend. The conference runs Tuesday to Friday, October 27th to the 30th, Tuesday is a day of classes whereas Wednesday through Friday is a three day conference featuring fifteen technical sessions on a number of topics. All in all it’s going to be another great event!

For more information about Unite ‘09 please visit the following URL:

http://unity3d.com/unite

To go ahead and buy your tickets today please visit our online store at the following URL:

https://store.unity3d.com/shop/unite

We’ll see you in San Francisco!

The folks at OverInteractive Media in Vancouver are very hot on Unity and they’re starting to spin up Unity Users Groups, starting in Vancouver but hoping to roll them out all over Canada and beyond. In addition to that they’re working on a next generation publishing channel for Unity developers called dimeRocker that will focus on Unity content and help developers reach out to social networking sites from one centralized location. It all sounds extremely cool in the long run but it’s still in its early stages so there will be more details as time rolls on. For now though they wanted to kick start their local user group by having a Unity TGIF networking event and I was invited up to Vancouver to deliver the keynote presentation. Following that they booked a Unity Skills Workshop the following day which was to be a 4-hour hands-on training class focusing on new users stepping into the product. Both turned out to be incredibly awesome, read on for details about both events as well as some photos!

Unity TGIF
For the TGIF event on Friday night they rented out an insanely cool renovated Chinese theater in town (District 319), gathered around 150 people (the majority of whom don’t yet use Unity) and gave me the opportunity to introduce them to our product. The evening started with a social welcoming event that lasted about an hour, then there were a few brief introductory presentations by J. Jolly of OverInteractive Media as well as Jason Bailey of Super Rewards (both of whom are cool guys to say the least), following them I was given the stage for an hour. During that time I covered the basics of who we are, where we come from, why were here and how Unity can help them achieve their game development goals. The presentation went great, the questions came from all corners, some tough, some easy, but all showing an intense interest from the audience. After my presentation was done I couldn’t leave the stage area for a good 45 minutes as folks kept on coming up to me asking even more questions. Luckily Darrel Plant (long-time Director user, now a Unity developer) saved me by bringing me a cold drink from the bar to quench my thirst! The social after-party went on Until 10pm or so with me getting to spend a lot of time chatting with folks and I think it’s going to lead to quite a number of new users. A few folks reported to me that they bought Unity on the spot right after my presentation! Gold!

Unity Skills Workshop
For the Saturday Skills Workshop they booked us into the Centre for Digital Media, a cool digital media school in Vancouver. I was able to get in front of 35 people and gave a four hour class on Unity. It covered the basics but everyone there seemed to dig it and hopefully take away some, if not a lot of tidbits of information. In the room were total newbies, some Unity developers and even one guy from EA Vancouver! One of the guages of well it went is that we went over-time by about 30-45 minutes (so many questions!), folks ran off to buy the product right away as well as tweet/blog/post to Facebook about the event. I’m altogether quite happy to have spent my Saturday like that! Following the class I was treated to a great dinner that night with a few notable folks from the local games industry which not only provided me with some seriously good food (Chambar was incredible!) but also some time to wind down and chat with some local industry folks, making great connections both personal and professional. We sat at the table for nearly three hours covering about every topic you can imagine, but with a bunch of game geeks the topics kept coming back to games and ultimately, Unity. Again, gold!

I Owe Some Thanks!
I want to note that J. Jolly and Glen Lougheed from OverInteractive Media (and their whole gang of folks in Vancouver) get tons of appreciation out of me. The entire weekend was on their tab, they paid for the airfare, my hotel, all meals, kept me fed, busy, happy and productive. Of course that wouldn’t have happened without the help of many local sponsors so I’d like to call each of them out:

OverInteractive Media
dimeRocker
Super Rewards
work [at] play
Fan Trust
Centre for Digital Media

And last but definitely not least…

bootup labs

Seriously, without those folks these events may not have ever happened, and if so they wouldn’t have been nearly as cool. Thanks for such an incredible weekend!

Let’s get on with a few pictures!

Folks arrive at District 319 and check in for the TGIF event

Food was served…

As were drinks…

Eventually I was on stage…

With a good crowd in attendance…

Who flooded me with questions both during and after my presentation (what’s up McKane and Bill! )

The Centre for Digital Media where the workshop was held on Saturday

An in-class action shot showing a packed house!

If you want to see more photos then check out the photos posted on Flickr!

I’ve been lucky enough to attend every Casual Connect conference in Seattle and without fail this year’s event was as awesome as ever. I’m quite impressed at the work done by the Casual Games Association as they’ve managed to expand this event from a few hundred or so in 2006 to something on the order of 2000 attendees as last week’s event, and they’ve done that while retaining the same cool vibe that makes it such a cool conference. I say that because the conference really does offer a great feel to it, it’s more like a community affair than some large anonymous bulk conference and it has such a great focus on the casual games business that it really speaks to the heart of most folks using (or that should be using) Unity.

Unfortunately I wasn’t lucky enough to get away from the table to attend any sessions but word on the “street” is that they were of course as valuable as ever. What I was lucky enough to enjoy was the incredible amount of traffic by our sponsor table and the wide range of meetings I was able to have with people from all backgrounds. What’s more is that we as a company noticed a very tangible shift in who was there asking about us. In years past most folks dropped by the booth with a “so, what’s Unity?” sort of approach, this year it was far more on the “I’ve heard of Unity and want to know more!” side, so they were intent and interested visitors to say the least!

All told we had an incredible time, we met with countless developers as well as a number of high-level strategic partners, and both of those groups will be extremely valuable in helping all of us push Unity even further in the coming weeks, months and years. I have to offer a big shout out to my fellow UT crew members that were there as they all worked hard and did a great job. On top of that I’ll offer another huge shout out to Luke Burtis of the Casual Games Association as he’s an incredible contact for us that’s managed to pull through on all accounts.

Thanks to our team, thanks to all the Unity users that were in the house, thanks to Luke and the Casual Games Association crew and of course thanks to everyone at the conference – that rocked!

On with some photos eh?

Preparing our sponsor table

David (at right) having a meeting

Tony (at left) chats up Michael from Mirax

A (rare) quiet moment at the table…