Its that time of year again!

It seems like a lifetime ago that I was attending my very first Global Game Jam back in early 2009.

I doubt I could ever have imagined that in the subsequent years I would be working for the company who’s tools I was using for the 48 hour caffeine sustained chaos.

So its with great joy that I’m happy to announce how we are supporting the Jam this year.

First and foremost we are issuing Unity Pro trials to ALL participants attending the jam. Which include iOS, Android and Asset Server. For more information please contact your local venue organizers who in turn, should be receiving information on how to get access to the trial from the global organizers.

In addition to that we are also supporting a small number of venues around the globe directly. These sponsorships will help keep you guys ticking over with food, drink, electricity, rental of space and all of the other costs included in setting up such a tremendous event.

Before I go I’d just like to wish everyone attending (or those still considering attending) the very best of luck. I’m a huge fan of Game Jams myself so I can’t wait to see what you guys come up with! (and I’m totally jealous that I won’t be able to participate this year)

With a huge feature set to show off, and new export targets such as the much talked about Flash and Google Native Client support, this developer preview is something of an early christmas gift we hope you’ll get a kick out of playing with. As if the carrot of previewing the features of 3.5 wasn’t enough, we are also running a contest for those of you interested in deploying Unity content to Flash, which could land you the awesome prize of $20,000 dollars.

Keep in mind that the preview of the Flash export support is just that – a preview, but we felt that we had hit a milestone that meant the feature was stable enough to let you guys get hands on and help us put it through its paces, as we’re sure you will! There are some limitations of our existing Unity feature set however, and you can jump onto the beta preview page and read the FAQ for more information, something we’ll be updating as time progresses so that you keep abreast of the latest information.

We have created a new section of the forum to help you discuss and organize your thoughts on any issues arising from the developer preview, so why not join in the debate now as you give Unity 3.5 a spin for yourself?

http://forum.unity3d.com/forums/33-Developer-Preview

Our good friends at Massive Black, who include some of the most accomplished and talented artists in the industry, have invited Unity to participate in their annual workshop! Unity artist reps Joe Robins and Roald Hoyer-Hansen will be on hand to dispense knowledge to help attending artists get the most out of the Unity tools and engine.

Massive Black has been hard at work creating one of the most amazing visual treats that has been developed using Unity. This will be shown for the first time at the Massive Black workshop and we can’t wait to see the final results.

Monday November 21st, Roald is teaching “Creating Cool Games without a Programmer” at 2:30-4pm and Joe is teaching “Creating a multi-platform Real-time portfolio for your artwork using Unity” at 4:30-5:30pm.

You can check out more information at: massiveblackworkshop.com

The London Unity Usergroup had its fifth and sixth events within the last 6 weeks (due to the former being delayed after the london riots), and I was there as always to capture the talks and show you what goes on at the meetups.

At MeetUp 5, Russ Morris and his colleague George showed off their fantastic game Super Springbreak Speedboat Hero SD. The game, designed in a retro 3D style is a passion project for the duo, who along with one other member go by pseudonym PLA. Piloting a speedboat around a custom course you design, avoiding sharks and dinosaurs, you can pit your time for the course against others online by sending a link that the game generates. Your opponent then races against a ghost of your run.

PLA – Making Super Springbreak Speedboat Hero SD

The second talk at Meetup 5 was by Beatnik studios – apologies to both them and you but the audio for this talk was lost due to a technical problem I won’t bore you with!

At Meetup 6, Mike Bithell gave a talk about how he is learning Unity to better realise his game Thomas Was Alone. This was a great talk as it highlights how quickly someone new to Unity can take the tool and start making very slick looking games – plus the concept is awesome! See the talk below.

Mike Bithell – Making Thomas Was Alone

Meetup 6 also featured an open mic talk by Benedetta Frida Baldi, a neuroscience PhD student who is making a game in Unity to teach how parts of the brain work, I’ll let the video speak for itself. A quick aside to ignore Russ’s comment that this was the first ever open mic we’d had – the first was actually Tom Jackson, discussing his game AWOL at LUUG 4! Hope to see more Open Mic projects shown at LUUG 7!

Open Mic – Benedetta Frida Baldi – Virtual biology

As usual, keep an eye on the meetup group for the scheduling of the next meetup, look forward to seeing you there! -
http://www.meetup.com/London-Unity-Usergroup/

They’ve also done an awesome job continuing their support of their services for Unity users by releasing several new tutorials that will help you get started. The latest videos will help the Blender, modo and zBrush crowds. Now go animate something/someone!

Blender:
http://www.mixamo.com/c/automatic-rigging-for-blender-unity3d

modo:
http://www.mixamo.com/c/automatic-rigging-for-modo-unity3d

zBrush:
http://www.mixamo.com/c/automatic-rigging-for-zbrush-unity3d

At the latest London Unity User Group, the evening kicked off with a beginner talk by Jasper Stocker, and was followed by ‘Open Mic’ talks by myself – demoing a quick Space Shooter demo I made in Unity – and LUUG regular Quickfingers, showing off a game he made for recent Ludum Dare 48 game jam. The headline act was Richard Fine, who gave an excellent talk on creating large game worlds in Unity.

As usual I do my best to capture the LUUG meets for others to catch up with, this time  however I only had a single camera to work with, and no screen capture – ability.. but here is the footage anyway! enjoy folks..

Quickfingers – Making AWOL for Ludum Dare

Richard Fine – Making Large Game Worlds

Part One

;

Part Two

For more info on London Unity Usergroup, including the next meetup, see the meetup site – http://www.meetup.com/London-Unity-Usergroup/

 

London Southbank University, 23rd June 2011 – Unity users, newcomers and developers gather at the third London Unity User Group (LUUG) to see presentations from developer Mike Renwick on his experience with recently launched Augmented Reality solution String (poweredbystring.com) and Jon from agency Preloaded on their experience of developing Boccia, a recent project for the Paralympics and UK TV channel, Channel4.

Without further ado, I’ll let the presentations speak for themselves, here they are -

Mike Renwick – String Augmented Reality

Preloaded – How we made Boccia

As usual, the event was followed by a meetup at the local pub, The Ship. The next meetup is scheduled for next month, with a date TBC, to subscribe to news visit the meetup page at -

http://www.meetup.com/London-Unity-Usergroup/

A picture is worth a thousand words, they say.

No, that’s not Conan O’Brien, it’s Brady Wright, our first quarter’s top seller on the Unity Asset Store! If you’re not familiar with his products, check out EZ-GUI and Sprite Manager.

You too can win an 8′  x 2′ check and utterly perplex your bank teller! Submit your content to the Unity Asset Store!

A huge congratulations,  Brady, from all of us at Unity Technologies.

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!

Unity Technologies is pleased to announce the winners of the Unity Mobile Generation Great Education Giveaway. Unity received 60 applications from leading game and research schools around the world. From amongst our first round submissions, twenty schools were selected to receive an Android smart phone and a mobile development suite from Unity Technologies. Today we are please to reveal our winners who will split a combined $250,000 in software and hardware prizes.

As part of the Mobile RFP, participating schools were asked to submit example curriculum and record two short video lectures demonstrating Unity on an Android device. Below are links to the winning curriculum and video lectures. In the coming months Unity will make more of these lectures and the sample curriculum available through our site.

The winners, in no particular order are:

Grand Prize Winners:

University of Arkansas – USA
“Of Mythology and ‘Droid”
Professor David Fredrick
Professor Russell Deaton
Professor Nilanjan Banerjee
Keenan Cole
Link to Lesson 1 Video, “Lighting, Decals, and Occlusion Culling”
http://vimeo.com/17961471

Link to Lesson 2 Video, “Terrain Workflow for Unity and Android”
http://vimeo.com/17961862

“Excellent, creative and fun approach: combines mythology with game development. Good focus on android. The course gives lots of technical information without being dull, because of being situated in a good example.”
—Nancy Doubleday, RIT.

“At first glance I shook my head…”Mythology”? But what a unique approach to introducing a game program and demonstrating the potential of games for learning. “ – John Jamison, RFP Review Committee, ImagiLearning

Rasmussen College- Ocala Campus – USA
School of Technology and Design
“Mobile Game Development With Unity 3D”
Program Coordinator William Sattelmeyer

Instructor Thomas Long

Week 1: www.vimeo.com/18034758

Week 3: www.vimeo.com/17964023www.vimeo.com/17946070

“Very, very thorough and well considered (proposal). They may be a little overly ambitious about what they can cover each day, but they know their students best. “
- Jeremy Gibson, USC

“Excellent understanding of course requirements, students needs, and development process. Demonstrates an existing understanding of industry needs.”
- Will Goldstone, Unity Technologies

Bond University – Australia
School of Communication and Media
“Mobile Game Design”
Associate Professor Penny de Byl

Lecture 1: http://www.vimeo.com/17919196

Lecture 4: http://www.vimeo.com/17918512

“Very thorough and professional course design. Good amount on android-specific stuff. Clear, concise, excellent content.”
—Nancy Doubleday, RIT.

“Just an overall well done program on game design.”
– John Jamison, ImagiLearning

The Grand prize winners will each receive 20 Android smart phones, 20 copies of Unity Pro and 20 Licenses of Unity Android Pro.

In addition to the winners above we are please to announce the following Runner Up Prize winners. The following runner up schools will each receive 10 copies of Unity Pro and 10 Unity Android Pro Licenses.

Runner Up Winners:

Ponficia Universidade Catolica de Minas Gerais – Brazil
Professor Marcelo Souza Nery

Vantan Game Academy – Japan
Instructor Keijiro Takahashi

Honorable Mention:
Southern Polytechnic State University – USA
Lead Faculty: Jeff Chastine
Associate Professor Jon A Preston

Acknowledgements

Unity would like to thank all of the schools who participated in the Great Education Give away. We would also like to give a special thank you to our judges panel:

Nancy Doubleday— Associate Professor, Rochester Institute of Technology–Interactive Games and Media

Jeremy Gibson— Game Design Faculty, University of Southern California, School of Cinematic Arts – Interactive Media Division

Peter Brinson– Instructor, University of Southern California, School of Cinematic Arts – Interactive Media Division

John Jamison— CEO and Creative Director, ImagiLearning, Inc.

Will Goldstone— Demonstrator in Interactive Media, Bournemouth University, Technical Support Associate, Unity Technologies

Andy Brammal— Unity Technologies Regional Director of Sales Europe, American Grid Iron Enthusiast

Nothing inspires us more than seeing talented developers make amazing games with Unity. That’s why we are proud to be the event sponsor of this year’s Nordic Game Jam and are offering Unity Pro licenses to the winning team.

The Nordic Game Jam starts at 6:00PM Friday, January 28 and consists of 48-hours of sleep-deprived game development fun. Available tickets are limited, so if you can make it to Copenhagen and are looking to collaborate and meet other game developers (including a more than a couple from Unity), you should sign-up today at the Nordic Game Jam site.

Collaboration is critical at an event like this. To help make your Game Jam a success, and to ensure that your team is able to work together efficiently and effectively, we’ve created a trial serial number for Unity Pro that includes an Asset Server addon license. The serial is active now, so you can start getting your work environment set up right away:

U3-YGTJ-2682-KKDQ-5535-NQ73

Of course, we also realize that The Nordic Game Jam is part of the Global Game Jam and that there will be game jams all over the world taking place in the same time slot of 48 hours. Feel free to use this serial wherever you are.

If you have never touched Unity before but would be curious to try it out for the Jam, you still have a week to play around and get used to how everything works. Why not start off by checking out these basic videos to get up to speed. Unity Basics

Oh and finally, good luck with the jam, have a cool weekend and enjoy making awesome!

Love,
Unity

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!

Wow, 2010 is almost over? What happened to the hoverboards, shiny tin foil jumpsuits and the zombie apocalypse? So I suppose I’ll have to wait a little longer for all that fun. In the meantime we have to make our own!.

To that end, we are running a cool competition on the lead up to the new year. The premise is simple: Tell us via the medium of twitter, using the #unity3d hash tag, what you want to create with Unity in 2011. In return we take the most awesome, ambitious, interesting and down right cool plan each week and give that person a Pro License.

A chance at getting a Pro License in return for a few words on the cool project you want to work on, pretty sweet deal no?

So for example:

“In 2011 I will make a hoverboarding game #unity3d”
“In 2011 I will take my indie game, and push it to the next level with pro #unity3d”
“In 2011 I will make a game that sends cake to Unity HQ #unity3d”

Ok, so those examples aren’t amazing but you get the idea. Be sure to use that precious letter count to the best of your ability! And above all.. get creative!

Full details on the competition, along with our winning list can be found right here at: http://unity3d.com/2011

Incoming
When you submit a bug report it goes into our Incoming Bug Queue. From there we do what we call sweeping. We weed out bug reports that contain nothing at all – no description, no information and no attached project, and we weed out the spam.

Investigation
All other bugs go into our Investigation Queue. In there we look at each case and simplify it until we get the cleanest scenario possible where the bug happens. If the steps are too unclear for us to reproduce the bug, or if we need a test project, we reply back to you asking for what we need. It’s also often a matter of the user doing something wrong or needing some help. In that case we respond with the assistance needed and add an entry to the documentation or answers.unity3d.com if needed.

Test Creation
The cases from investigation that are actually real bugs are then moved to our Test Creation Queue. Now what does that mean – didn’t we already test it? Well, it means that we take the simplified reproduction case and implement it in one of our automated test frameworks, depending on where the case fits. We have a few of those including our awesome Regression Rig. When the test is written, it will continuously run on multiple platforms. Whenever new code and functionality is committed, it will be held up against the growing list of tests. In theory this ensures that once a bug has been fixed and added to the automated tests, it will never show it’s ugly face again.

Fixing and verifying
From the test creation queue we end up with either writing a test or in some cases where this is not feasible, we make sure that the steps to reproduce the bugs are crystal clear. Then we assign the case to development. One of our highly specialized developers will take the case, fix it and send it back to us for verification. At this point the test written should always pass and the test department also verifies the fix manually. If something is not right, it’s back to the developer until we are sure the bug is really fixed.

It has taken us a long time to hone these processes – Unity has grown immensely since the early days when there wasn’t even a Test department but just a handful of programmers making the product, testing it and providing support. Unity is now vastly bigger in terms of features, users and people working on the product. This also means, that there was a time when our capacity for handling bugs and support cases was lower and we didn’t have the same processes. The test team is bigger now and armed to the teeth with sharpened minds, rockstar programming skills and a work horse mentality.

Onwards!
One of the ways we’re moving along now is drawing a line somewhere in the backlog of cases from when our capacity was lower. We have a bunch of old cases where the majority are duplicates of already fixed cases, cases with no information or cases that are obsolete because of changes in Unity. We will be focusing on the newer bugs, but there will also be something in that old pile that still has relevance. Chances are that these issues will have been reported again with Unity 2.6 or 3.0, but if you are sitting with an old bug report you submitted, that you believe is still relevant then you can help us get to it by submitting it again.

We are aiming for a workflow where we process each and every relevant case that gets opened and provide feedback as soon as possible. I hope you’re up for the task of helping us by submitting high quality bug reports and that you will continue to have a little patience and love for the Test Team – cause we love you!

Swinburne University of Technology AU
Rasmussen College US
Central Piedmont Community College US
University of North Florida US
Purdue University US
Rochester Institute of Technology US
Champlain College US
Upper Austria University of Applied Sicenses AT
Tokyo University of Technology JP
Bradley University US
University of Arkansas US
College of St. Scholastica US
Nassau Community College US
Bond University AU
Southern Polytechnic State University US
George Mason University US
University of Wales, Newport UK
Abilene Christian University US
Pontíficia Universidade Católica de São Paulo BR
Lewis University US

All together we received over 60 submissions from high schools, community colleges, universities and graduate schools. Submissions came from all parts of the world including the US, Austria, Australia, Japan, Brazil, the UK, South Korea, Columbia, Mexico and the Philippines. Although it was difficult to pick just 20 winners, we feel the proposals from these schools were a cut above in their level of detail and impact for their region.

These first round winners will each receive a license to Unity Pro, Unity Android and a Google Nexus One phone to develop, refine and test their curriculum proposals. In the second round of the RFP three lucky schools will be chosen to win a full 20 seat Android mobile development lab including Unity Pro, Unity Android Pro and 20 Google Nexus One Phones.

Congratulations to the winners and we look forward to seeing your secound round submissions!

First up is design3, a subscription based site created by Noesis Interactive, who create professional courseware for Universities. They have over 200 Unity specific videos and more on the way. Whether an educator, a student, or a business, you can check out their free trial and see if it works for you.

Next up we have Will Goldstone’s Unity 3D Student. This is a great concept, he doesn’t provide the standard “here is a huge tutorial about how to make X kind of game” but rather has micro tutorials that teach fundamental concepts — and then challenges that require the student to piece together what they’ve learned.

And finally, the Tornado Twins have begun to serve up their tutorials on their Unity Prefabs site. The first few chapters of each series are free; if you like them then you can purchase the remaining chapters for that series.

We’re having a great Summer: We passed the 200,000 user mark, we passed the 30 million webplayer mark, we won the Develop Grand Prix, and we’re getting ready to ship Unity 3. To celebrate all this, we decided to throw a party.  For our blog readers who happen to find themselves in the SF bay area next week, why not join us for drinks after work on Tuesday the 24th of August?

For details, and to RSVP, please visit http://unitysf.eventbrite.com

Yup, you read that right, it’s that time of year again, the time to get yourself ready for this year’s edition of our annual developer’s conference, Unite 2010!

Unite 2010
November 10-12, 2010
Montreal, Quebec Canada

Once again, Unite 2010 will bring artists, programmers, designers, researchers, publishers, and other Unity enthusiasts from around the world together for three intense days of learning and networking. The conference will be held on November 10-12, 2010 at the Marché Bonsecours in Montreal, Canada. A detailed agenda is on the way, but tickets are on sale now! Early Bird pricing lasts until September 10th and during that time tickets are only $300, after the Early Bird pricing expires tickets will be $400. If you’re just that eager then go for it and buy your tickets to Unite 2010 today!

Purchase Tickets

If you’re at all like me then you’re out there wanting more information, a lot more information! Well, we don’t have everything sorted just yet but I can point you to the early information that we do have. First let me point you to the press release that we put out just this morning that announced Unite 2010 with some important information and a few great quotes:

Unity Technologies Announces Unite 2010, It’s 4th Annual Developer Conference

After reading the press release you should hop on over to our website for additional information about the conference:

Unite 2010: Save The Date

Our website has information about Unite 2010, including information about where the conference is being held and travel information to help get you there. Our website also touches on the conference agenda which is still in development, but with that comes the opportunity for members of the community (that’s you!) to submit your own presentation proposals as we have an open call for speakers!

Unite 2010: Call for Speakers

I have no doubts in my mind, Unite 2010 is going to be another incredible week during which we’ll get to hang out together, to Unite to share our passion for Unity. Be there!

Hello Unity Community. This is my first blog post and I’m happy to be sharing some very exciting news. I joined Unity almost two months ago to assist with commercial and institutional licensing. In my short time here, Unity has maintained a whirlwind pace of product announcements, resource partnerships, tech demos and conference appearances. It has certainly been an exhilarating start to a new job.

Prior to joining Unity I spent a number of years working with colleges setting up game design and game programming courses around the world. In 2005 there were only 30 schools that offered any sort of accredited game development courses. Fast-forward to 2010 and hundreds of higher education institutions are now offering, not just courses, but full-fledged degrees in 3D simulation and electronic game production. During this time, Unity has rapidly become the most popular game engine in use at these schools. Every month dozens of professors and program directors contact us asking for more information about adopting Unity Pro and Unity iPhone.

Unity is also firmly committed to supporting the Google Android platform. We strongly feel that competition in the mobile handset and tablet PC markets will create lucrative opportunities for mobile developers. Last week we announced a huge opportunity for Unity developers who want to expand their business to Android: we are giving away 500 Nexus One Android phones (details available here.) However, in our eagerness to kick start Unity Android game production, we do not want to skip over the important role schools play in shaping the next generation of application designers. That is why I am pleased to announce that today Unity is opening an RFP (Request For Proposal) to select up to three schools whose programs will each be awarded 20 copies of Unity Android Pro, Unity Pro and 20 Nexus One Phones.

The full details of the RFP can be accessed here. For additional questions please post comments in the space below or contact us directly at education@unity3d.com .

Disclaimers

We will try to ship phones to most places. Although accredited colleges and universities worldwide are eligible, Unity Technologies can only ship phones to addresses in the US, Canada, EU / EEA states, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. If Unity Technologies cannot ship a phone(s) to a school because of taxes, embargoes, FCC restrictions, customs duties and / or fees levied by the destination country or any other reason, Unity Technologies may still grant the software portion of the award. Unity Technologies reserves the right at all times to cancel or alter to the award criteria and reclaim any awarded materials

All participating schools agree that this promotion shall be governed by the laws of the state of Denmark.

Rezzable brings Unity & Open Sim together.

As our resident virtual world enthusiast, I’m always on the lookout for Unity developers making progress in the field. One of the most recent and exciting examples of this is heralded by the folks at London-based Rezzable. Renowned for their highly innovative and rich environments in Second Life, Rezzable has ingeniously created a Unity based client which works with OpenSim,  an open source Second Life compatible server.  Their technology communicates directly with the OpenSim back-end to stream and rez/instantiate SL-compatible content, including its very unique prim and sculpted-prim geometry right into Unity in real time.

Rezzable is using virtual worlds to teach real world history.

Rezzable’s innovation promises to blend Unity’s powerful AAA, browser-based technology with the vast banks of virtual world data created by OpenSim and Second Life world-builders over the last 8 years. This marriage between new technology and existing content offers a continuity to virtual world developers who needn’t scrap their existing body of work in order to take advantage of Unity’s next-gen functionality.

A Monumental Milestone - Unity, Rezzable & Opensim!

Kudos to Rezzable and world-builders everywhere, working hard to bring Unity and the dream of a digital metaverse together.  Do you have any exciting news about Unity and virtual world development or applications?  Please share!

Muse Games just released our game “Guns of Icarus” on Steam! Thanks to Unity’s cross-platform support, we were able to be one of the first SteamPlay games available.

Guns of Icarus, as well as Max and the Magic Marker and Bob Came in Pieces are all Unity games which were available at launch as “SteamPlay” games — games which you can buy on Steam and then download for either Mac or PC, or both. I had to find out more, so I contacted Austin Lane, one of the founders of Muse Games.

What’s your name/title?
Austin Lane, we’re pretty small so our titles don’t mean much but I’m essentially the creative/product director. Brian Kehrer, our technical director, helped with some of the dev questions. We’re both co-founders.

What is Muse Games, a developer or a portal?
Both! We believe completely in the future of high-quality gaming in the browser, and MuseGames.com is our attempt to realize that future. That said, we feel it’s our duty to set the bar through our own games. In the end, people are looking to play great games, and if they’re no good it’s irrelevant what the rest of the experience is.

Also, we truly relish the creativity & freedom that gamemaking brings us. We had a serious two hour conversation about flamethrowers the other day. I mean c’mon, that’s awesome.

How long has Muse Games been using Unity?
Muse has only existed for about 16 months, but the core team has been using Unity since 2006!

When did you start developing Guns of Icarus? What was the development timeframe? How large was the team?
We developed Guns of Icarus last summer and fall. It took us about 5 months total and we had between 3 and 4 team members (+ some extra art help) working on it through that time.

What was the process of getting Guns of Icarus onto Steam like? Did you have to do any technical integrations? Any kinds of loops that you had to jump through with Valve?
Really easy actually. We just showed them the game and what people thought about it and they said yes. There has been no loop jumping whatsoever and we’ve really enjoyed working with them. Technically though, yes, there are implementation details. We had to build a compatibility layer between the C++ of Steam and the C# of Unity, and that took some time. If anyone’s interested, we’re gonna figure out how to offer this solution along with our other API tools to developers sometime this summer.

Do you have plans to develop future titles with Unity? Any details?
Absolutely. Our next title “CreaVures” will be debuting this summer. We’ll have a trailer for everyone in just a few weeks. We’re really excited about that. We’re also debuting an entirely new MuseGames.com next month.

And there’s even bigger announcements coming that won’t start popping up til later this year!

Anything you can say about your Unity meetups in NYC?
They’re really casual and really fun. We combine Unity discussion with actual gaming of all kinds (console, pc, board, etc), which really helps people bond and stimulates genuine discussion. We spend enough time hearing theory and poring over implementation details during work, so we try to use our meetups to forget about that stuff for a second and help remind us what it’s all about – the joy of gaming. Also we have free beer. So that’s good.

How many of the games on Musegames.com were developed by Muse Game vs third parties?
We’ve just recently debuted our first two 3rd party games, but that’s been a long time coming largely because of all the backend development we’ve been getting in to order. This summer we’ll be ramping up our 3rd party publishing significantly, and our release pipeline is starting to look pretty solid . MuseGames.com is ready to show the world what Unity & the community are capable of.

p.s. If you’re a developer with a great game, let us know!

What’s your favorite aspect of using Unity?
Ease of prototyping & multiple deployment is by far Unity’s killer feature. However equally important to the easy to use tool set and API is the ability to dig deeper into the program and interact with the application on a much lower level. We find that Unity does exactly what we want 90% of the time – out of the box. When we need to go deeper or change fundamental behavior, Unity doesn’t get in the way or slow us down.

Have you extended Unity’s editor in any way?
We’ve frequently used the editor scripts to add small features or to integrate better with our art pipeline; this includes things like exporting arbitrary textures to files, or changing the default mesh import settings. But there have been a couple of larger extensions, as well. The first is our build scripts, which have to build multiple versions of the same game for different distributors with different integration requirements, feature restrictions, and so forth. We’ve also added game-specific extensions to turn the Unity editor into something like a level editor, using custom assets and editor tabs, that can integrate new scenes with our game code without a programmer needing to set anything up.

Have you/Muse Games used any other technologies like Flash or Unreal? How do they compare?
Not really. Flash is a strange solution because it wasn’t originally designed for game development. It’s been co-opted because of its plugin penetration, while Unity was built from the beginning to make powerful, modern games. If we want to change the future of gaming on the web, we need to look to the future of gaming on the web. We don’t think Flash is the future.

Unreal is a great, powerful tool like Unity. Just look at the level of games being made with it. But it can’t handle the web and cross-platform development we’re focusing on, and quite frankly, the licensing terms are really expensive for an indie like us.

It’s no secret we favor Unity for these reasons and more.

Do you have any tips on how to get exposure for your game or how to reach new audiences?
Make an original game, and polish it. Gamers, despite their cynicism, are the most engaged and adventurous audience around. If you make something good, they will give you a chance. I’m not sure why so many people choose to clone games they’ve seen countless times before. Don’t sell yourself short. Pretend you’re building the next franchise. If you only had one chance to make a game ever, even if its just in your spare time (actually, especially if its in your spare time), what game would you make? Make that game.

That will go miles further than any marketing you can do.

Also, good trailers are really worth it – chances are high the trailer is where the potential player will be making a go or no-go decision.

Anything else about your game or your company that you’d like to share?
We love to hang out and avoid work. If you’re in the area (downtown Manhattan) stop by!

Anything else about Unity that you’d like to share?
Unity makes a lot of what we do possible – rapid prototyping & development, 3d on the web, cross-platform deployment. But Unity alone cannot change the end consumer’s mind. It’s up to us developers to show people what the tool is capable of. Content sells the platform, and it’s going to take all of us to change the face of online gaming

Terrain Toolkit

The Terrain Toolkit is an integrated set of tools for the Unity Editor which is designed to streamline and improve the workflow involved in creating realistic terrains for games. The toolkit enables the creation of large scale, realistic and playable game worlds within a very short time span.

Unity already has a powerful terrain engine as one of its core features. The Terrain Toolkit expands on this by providing the user with the ability to rapidly create a variety of different landscapes directly within Unity without needing to use third party software. An additional advantage is that landscapes can now be generated dynamically at runtime. This means a Unity game can have a potentially infinite number of levels or landscapes with a negligible impact on the file size.

Integrated terrain creation tools

The Terrain Toolkit provides an intuitive interface within the Unity Editor allowing a Unity artist to simply generate, erode and texture terrain objects. Quick and easy-to-use presets are provided for first time users, while advanced users can tweak low level settings such as rainfall and evaporation to get exactly the result they are after.

Watch the tutorial video to learn more about using the Terrain Toolkit:

A powerful runtime API

The Terrain Toolkit comes with a powerful API that allows developers to call any of the terrain generation, erosion and texturing scripts at runtime.

This Unity web player shows the Terrain Toolkit API in action: http://www.sixtimesnothing.com/terraintoolkit/APIExample.html

Where to next?

I plan to continue work on the Terrain Toolkit by both making further improvements to existing features, as well as expanding on the feature set to allow even more flexibility in the creation of procedural terrain.

Here are some of the planned features for future versions of the Terrain Toolkit:

• Texture presets
• User defined presets
• The ability to apply pre-defined presets through the API
• Realtime destructible terrain
• The ability to create multiple, maskable terrain ‘layers’
• An advanced hydraulic erosion filter based on a shallow water model
• Glacial erosion

Documentation

Comprehensive documentation for the Terrain Toolkit and the API is included in HTML format. The latest version of the documentation can also be viewed here: http://www.sixtimesnothing.com/terraintoolkit

Questions and support

If you have any questions about the Terrain Toolkit, the API, or any suggestions for improvements or new features, please feel free to contact me on the Unity forums (Nekharoth) or through my developer blog: http://sixtimesnothing.wordpress.com

Get the Terrain Toolkit from our Resources section.

I have been working on a Unity Javascript mode for Emacs for a few weeks ago and now is in a state that is usable enough to share with the community .

As you can see it colors comments (multiline and single line), has support for basic data types, and also supports string coloring.

It also colors function declarations, if – else decisions, while and for/foreach loops and most importantly, it colors all the Unity functions supported by the engine!

Feel free to modify it. Also if you do anything interesting that can be added to the mode just let me know!

If I have time I’ll add a function to open the browser and search the docs for the word where the cursor is positioned. If for some reason you make it before I can, then just contact me and I’ll add it to the mode .

Anyway, if you, like me, are an emacs addict, you can grab this mode from here: unityjs-mode.el

To make it work, just add this to your .emacs:


;; UnityJS mode for emacs
(autoload 'unityjs-mode "unityjs-mode" "Major mode for editing Unity Javascript code." t)
(require 'unityjs-mode)

And make sure to load the path where you are going to store the mode .

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.