GDC is nearly upon us, I can’t believe it! We’ve got so much going on at this year’s show — there will be plenty of chances for people to learn more about Unity throughout next week. I’m going to give you a rundown of where we’ll be and what we’ll be doing.

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!

In addition to all of our other GDC activities, we’re going to be joined in our booth with a selection of great partners. This is a win-win opportunity where we’re able to bring some more exposure to these partners and their presence helps our booth to reflect the diverse ecosystem that surrounds our tool and community! Each of these partners is going to be on hand to demo their products at their kiosk and will also have an opportunity to present in our theater. I hope you’ll come to see what they have to offer! In order to entice you, here is some info about them:

Graveck is a Saint Paul based development studio specializing in games developed using the powerful Unity engine. With their unparalleled Unity experience and drive, Graveck creates top-notch web games and retail boxed games for world renowned clients along with groundbreaking original titles. They also had the number 1 top paid app in the App Store for five weeks!

OpenFeint is the largest and most successful social gaming network, with over a thousand games and fourteen million players. Think Xbox Live meets Facebook for the iPhone with features like challenges, leaderboards, achievements, chat, forums and powerful game discovery. OpenFeint is the free, easy way for developers and players to get more out of games.

Aquiris is a development studios baased in Porto Alegre, state of Rio Grande do Sul, southern of Brazil. They've been developing games and other interactive media for both Brazilian and global companies. They are amongst the most prolific Unity developers, having developed a total of 20 games projects, 13 of which were started and completed after establishing their games focus in January of 2008.

Noesis Interactive is the premier developer of Video Courseware and training materials for indie-developers and game modders. Noesis is dedicated to improving gaming related education worldwide and preparing its users for industry careers or independent production. Noesis is based in the California San Francisco Bay Area, just minutes from Silicon Valley.

Digimi On the heels of a successful merger, DAZ 3D-Gizmoz present Digimi, the ultimate platform for generating personalized avatars. Leveraging the collaboration of existing technologies from DAZ 3D and Gizmoz, Digimi offers a premier solution for complete avatar customization in Unity and allows developers to import photo-realistic heads and customized avatars into games and virtual worlds at runtime.

dimeRocker is a branded self-publishing platform that enables Unity developers to deploy, monetize and build traffic across the social web (Facebook, mySpace, etc.) for their 3D games from one central account. The goal is to provide a complete solution so developers can spend less time managing the web and more time creating the best content possible. They're set to launch their open beta during GDC, so keep your eyes peeled!

Tony Garcia, Director of Business Development, and I went to Toronto recently for a whirlwind Unity tour like the one Tom Higgins did not too long ago in Vancouver. What can we say? We love supporting Canadanian Unity developers! It also helps that J. Joly over at OverInteractive Media keeps setting events like these up.

The actual events happened November 10th and 11th as a networking mixer for the launch of the Toronto Unity User Group (UUG) and a Unity Skills Workshop the next day. Tony did a keynote presentation at the Gladstone Hotel for the networking mixer and had a short Q&A with attendees. The next day, I did a three and a half hour workshop at George Brown College. Both events were packed full and it was great meeting so many Unity developers.

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Now that we’re clear of the frantic week we call Unite 2009 let’s talk about the also incredible Unity Awards! Once again we had a huge increase in not only the total number of submissions (129!) but also in the overall content and quality of those submissions. It was a tough job to pare down the submissions into a list of top contenders in each category, and then even tougher for our team of judges to whittle those down to a list of their top-5 favorites in each category. The end result was that 13 games in particular seemed to stand out the most as those titles occupied the top-5 positions across all four categories. Without further adieu let’s go through each of the categories and see a list of the finalists and winners…

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!

So finally I’m uploading the photos after a day of great news!

First we start with all the people crowded at the hall of the conference room:

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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!

For those who couldn’t come or those who didn’t know, today was the first day of Unite 09, everything was great!

Still we had some minor technical issues with the Internet, but we finally handled them.

So on this first day, here are some photos:

The Unity Conference entrance.

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So, a bunch of us are busy getting everything ready for Unite – check out this people of guys who’s responsible for doing the conference visuals. It’s a pretty sweet setup (and this is just whatever gear they could fit in their hand luggage).

The projection image on the wall is the final result of camera input and the presenter slides which will get liveedited to a separate machine. They’re mixing everything in realtime using modul8 vj software.

We’ll also be color-keying in the conference visuals with our slides. Cool stuff – I just hope it doesn’t crash…

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!

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