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)

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/

For me personally its been an amazing ride to see the evolution of the conference and the level that we have reached in the last few years. Topping it again next year is certainly going to be a challenge but we do have some extraordinary people who have worked insanely hard to make this years conference the great success it was.

On behalf of everyone at Unity I would like to thank all the people who came to the conference from far and wide. The Unity Community is not only extreemly awesome, it is also the very reason we can all do what we do.

This Unite it was great to finally show some of the super awesome 3.5 and beyond features. When working in one of the development offices at Unity you see these features being developed over time and it can be easy to forget how insanely cool all of this stuff is. So unveiling these new game changing tools to the people who will put them to use is always a joy.

Friday was once again jam packed with some really cool sessions all of which we are working triple hard to get live as soon as humanly possible. Be sure to check out this link in order to see the sessions that are getting converted to videos and being posted to the site. They will be available at the videos section of our site.

Once again, thanks to everyone who was able to attend. I had a truly awesome time and I am almost scared to see if we will continue to have double the number of attendees again next year

Without further ado, here is the link to the Keynote.

Earlier in the day we had a plethora of sessions covering topics ranging from business to art.

Highlights included a sneak peak of the new Shuriken particle system, which is shaping up to be a truly awesome new feature. We also held the Unity Road Map and Wish List session, where attendees are welcomed to quiz us about the future direction of Unity and we open up a dialog to ensure our development road map is in sync with what our users want. The Road Map and Wish List sessions for those who have never been to Unite, are unique in as much as the entire session is off the record and its a chance to talk frankly about the direction Unity is taking so this is one session that you have to be at Unite to see.

At the end of the day we held the Unity Awards. It was great fun to present and we gave out some very deserving awards.

The winners were as follows:

Best Student Game
GLiD – Spiderling

Best Cross-platform Game
Buddy Rush – Team Sollmo of Company 100

Best Gameplay
Rochard – Recoil Games

Best Graphics
Rochard – Recoil Games

Best Non-game
Virtual History Roma – Mondadori

Community Choice
Battlestar Galactica Online – Bigpoint and Artplant

Grand Prix
Battleheart – Mika Mobile

Again I would like to congratulate all the people who entered the competition. There was some absolutely tremendous work produced this year.

On a side note, we also plan to have our session videos up in record breaking time this year. So everyone in the community who was unable to make it, can check out all the cool stuff that has happened so far.

One last note I would like to make, is that there are plans this Friday for anyone who is around, to attend a Unity Game Jam at the San Francisco hacker space Noisebridge.
Its being organized via facebook so if you are interested in jamming, check out the facebook event

The keynote included a host of major announcements and 3.5 feature demos. We will be getting a video online as soon as possible for anyone who wasn’t able to be here for it – and for those that want to go back and watch it all again

Some highlights of our keynote included news of our first acquisition, which comes in the form of Montreal-based studio Mécanim — now known as Unity Canada. We had been talking to them for a while, really loved their tech and thought they were cool guys. The team is hard at work building a character animation tool that will mean big things for Unity users. They worked on Motion Builder, FBX, and HumanIK.

Joachim also gave a sneak peak of some of the awesome new features coming to 3.5 including: Level of detail, Integrated AI and pathfinding, Light probes, Our whole new particle system “Shuriken” and much more.

Also shown was the launch trailer for Madfinger’s new title Shadowgun, which launched on the app store yesterday as well as a sneak peak at the new title, Bladeslinger being developed by Luma Arcade.

We also demoed AngryBots running in a browser via flash using our in-development build to flash feature.

And as if that wasn’t enough we then had an awesome guest speaker in David Brevik, president and COO at Gazillion Entertainment who had some great advice on making the most of the technology we have and being part of building a golden age in gaming.

1 day down, 2 days of awesome to go.

It may be a worthy read both for artists and programmers, as we discuss the possibilities of some unusual special effects and their technical side.

Get it while it’s fresh: Special Effects with Depth (14MB pdf)

Yours,

Kuba and Ole

Ahem.

So yeah, a bunch of us were at SIGGRAPH 2011 in lovely Vancouver, doing talks, meeting people and going to super interesting sessions. Me & ReJ did a long technical session about optimizing graphics for mobile platforms. GPU architectures, shader optimization details, case studies from actual Unity games and so on.

Here it is: Fast Mobile Shaders (17MB pdf).

Enjoy!

Hand’s demonstration on making cross platform games with Unity, Part 1
Time: 9:30am – 10:20am
Speaker: Carl Callewaert

A hands-on demonstration of the development of a multiplatform game starting with prototyping the game to the final version running on Android, iOS, the web, Facebook and as a standalone app. The steps include but are not limited to: programming, art assets import and updating, particles, GUI, AI and building for multiplatform deployment.

Hand’s demonstration on making cross platform games with Unity: Part 2
Time: 10:50am – 11:40am
Speaker: Carl Callewaert

A hands-on demonstration of the development of a multiplatform game starting with prototyping the game to the final version running on Android, iOS, the web, Facebook and as a standalone app. In this part more advanced topics will be covered.

Performance optimization tips and tricks for Unity
Time: 12:40pm – 1:30pm
Speaker: Jonas Echterhoff

This session will demonstrate optimization techniques on a sample Unity project, show how to use the Unity profiler to find performance bottlenecks, and will show some common pitfalls to avoid for optimal performance in Unity projects.

Shader Authoring in Unity
Time: 2:00pm –   2:50pm
Speaker: Shawn White

It’s difficult to make a game today without writing at least one shader. Whether you’re indie, mainstream, or somewhere in the middle, having the ability to write your own shaders will give you what you need to make your game POP! Unity provides a suite of built-in shaders to get you started, but in this talk we’ll get you up to speed on what you need to know about writing your very own shaders in Unity.

Being Social: How Games Can Leverage Facebook on the Road to Success
Time: 3:20pm –   4:10pm
Speaker: Tom Higgins

The explosive growth of social networking is changing the ways in which people of every type interact with each other in some incredible ways. That’s easy to say but it takes a bit more effort to properly understand. What are those changes? Are they limited to those creating browser-based content or do they extend to the desktop and mobile apps as well? And most importantly, how can you and your team take advantage of them in your games? This presentation will discuss some of the most prominent questions facing developers targeting social networking sites and describe how developers can put that information to use right away. The discussion will focus on Facebook and the Unity game engine in particular as they offer developers unique opportunities for success. But in the end the strategies that will be shared can easily be applied anywhere, regardless of what social networking site or game engine is being used. Developers of all types can attend this session and learn how to incorporate social networking features into their own efforts, from the early design phases all the way through to release, giving themselves a much greater chance of success.

Using and publishing content and extensions on the Unity Asset Store
Time: 4:40pm –   5:30pm
Speaker: Tom Higgins

This session will start with an introduction to the Asset Store, showing what is available and demonstrate how to search for and use content in your own projects. After that he will go through how to submit your own content and extensions to the store, how it should be formatted and go through common mistakes to avoid and other hints for speeding up the submission process.

Distribution with Union
Time: 5:40pm –   6:30pm
Speaker: Brian Bruning

There’s never been a better time to be a game developer.  Huge audiences are now reachable without the aid of publishers or retail outlets.  But what are the odds of getting noticed out there today in the new digital landscape?  What tactics are most effective?  What should you be doing to get noticed and find customers?

Studio Workshops

Monday, August 8th
10:40am- 12:10pm Joe Robins “Creating a Multi-platform, Real-time Portfolio for Your Artwork”
3:45pm- 5:15pm Aras Pranckevicius and Renaldas Zioma “How to Write Fast iPhone and Android Shaders in Unity”

Studio Talks

Monday, August 8th
12pm-1pm Roald Hoyer-Hansen “Creating a Cool Game Without a Programmer”

Tuesday, August 9th
10:30am- 11:30am Kuba Cupisz and Ole Ciliox “Special Effects with Depth”

Thursday, August 11th
10:30am- 12pm Robert Cupisz and Kaspar Daugaard “Lighting Worlds in Unity”

 

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/

Focusing intensively on creating their technology for use with Unity, String have been working with a number of respected Unity developers to create showcase material as they have worked through an intensive beta stage over the past year.

At today’s Augmented Reality Summit, String will unveil some of their latest developments that go far beyond what they have teased so far. You can watch the String presentation via the following Stream live or as an edited version once their talk has finished -

Democratising Augmented Reality

String touts one of its key selling points as being fast, stable and easy to use, and they are keen to remind Unity developers that they aim to bring a formerly somewhat inaccessible technology to a new audience of developers thanks to their easy to use toolset. Time will tell how you Unity developers take them up on this but I for one can’t wait to see what you all come up with! Demonstrations so far have been impressive and with further super-secret stuff being unveiled at the Summit, the power of String has yet to be seen.

In a press release combined with today’s launch, Alan Maxwell, CEO and founder states “We are delighted to officially launch String™ to the world. We’d like to thank everyone for their support and interest. There’s been huge anticipation from both the global development community and international brands. We’re very excited to finally unleash String™, and to be working closely with our partners to drive innovation. We can’t wait to see the ideas that emerge, and we are working hard to develop the technology even further, so watch this space.”

You can meet the Unity DevRel team this week at the annual E3 Expo in Los Angeles. We’ll be at the Sony Ericsson booth in South Hall #713. Stop by and show us your commercial Unity game and receive an exclusive Unity Developer T-Shirt! Hear about how to optimize your games for the Android-based Sony Xperia PLAY and the many other platforms we support. The Union team will also be present to discuss opportunities to bring your games to new devices, markets and services.

Also be sure to check out the amazing Glu Mobile 500Gs Developer Contest. Submissions must be created with Unity and it’s a great chance for your creativity and gameplay to earn you part of the $500k USD in worldwide prizes. Time is short for submissions, so don’t delay!

We look forward to working with you and seeing what you create with Unity!

At the end of the week it could do this however:

This is our Bootcamp demo, running in D3D11. So lots of the stuff is working: meshes, textures, shaders, shadows, deferred lighting, Image Effects, particles, skinned meshes, terrain and so on. For the reference, Bootcamp running on DX9:

As you can see, some of the stuff is not working on D3D11 yet. Fog is not working; there’s some lighting difference on grass. Some other things are not working, like fixed function shaders (VertexLit ones or any shaders that use SetTexture) but you can’t see much of those in Bootcamp.

Awesome? Yes and no.

For basically a week of work, I’d like to think this is very good progress.

Is our D3D11 renderer teh awsum yet? No. Currently it’s running slower than D3D9, and does not implement all the features of D3D9 one either (fog, fixed function etc.). And I haven’t even started exposing D3D11 specific things like Compute Shaders, Shader Model 4/5, Tessellation etc. And there are some unsolved workflow issues, for example: when someone is making a game on a Mac, how would we compile shaders for D3D11 renderer? With D3D9 we can do it because NVIDIA’s Cg compiler works both on Windows and Mac, but no such luck with D3D11 shader compiler…

So this is not shipping quite yet. Performance is not great at the moment – which is to be expected. D3D11 potentially can be faster than D3D9, but the path of getting there is not an easy one. We also need to actually expose compute shaders, tessellation and other goodies. And then think about how/if equivalent features would work on other platforms like Macs (DirectCompute on Windows, OpenCL on Mac? etc.).

But, so far it’s promising! Stay tuned, maybe someday we’ll ship this

The idea behind this project is to make use of the Webkit integration that was used for the Asset Store in order to give easy access to learning resources, news and more.

We still have a few more NinjaCamp tricks up our ninja sleeves so keep an eye on the blog.

For our NinjaCamp project, Levi, Vytautas, and I (Na’Tosha) decided to pursue our passion for GNU/Linux — we thought we would invest our time into getting a web player up and running on an Ubuntu workstation.  It’s turned out to be quite the endeavor, but, after a few days of poring through the Mozilla Developer’s Reference, the OpenGL documentation, the X11 documentation, and countless stacktraces (not to mention pouring ourselves dozens of caffeinated beverages), we do have something to show for our efforts:

Our Demo shown at GDC running in Firefox 4.0 on Ubuntu 10.10.

Despite the fact that Firefox 4.0 has not been released yet, we chose to use 4.0 and leverage some goodies from the new API.

It’s completely unpolished – we can’t even reload the unity engine in the same browser instance, and it of course lacks niceties like a splash screen, etc.  Although it is just a demonstration that we put together in a week, and it is not an official Unity project, all in all, we’re quite proud of ourselves.

About the Game:
The game is a 2.5D adventure game called “The Adventures of Steve.” Steve is just a casual guy who has stumbled upon a temple which has some evil traps set for him. His only wish now is to get out so that his life can return to normal.

We’re adding a context menu item in the asset window to “Filter References in Scene”. Selecting it will apply a filter to your hierarchy window to find all GameObjects or their children that reference the selected asset.

Alternatively the filter can be specified manually by using the “ref:ASSET PATH” syntax.

With two days of NinjaCamp to go we expect to finish the “Filter References in Project” option too. It will help you find other assets (prefabs, scenes) that use the selected asset.

Take care, Uniteers!

As our NinjaCamp project Bas and I decided on a cause a bit humbler than many of the other projects going on here: We just want to improve the workflow of creating a new script in Unity.

The current way to make a new behaviour for a GameObject in Unity is like this:

• Create the script in the desired folder.
• Rename the script.
• If it’s a C# script, rename the class to match the file name.
• Drag the script onto the GameObject.

With the solution we’re working on, you can instead just choose “New Script” from the Components menu, and you’ll get this:

This is a work in progress, but much of the base functionality is already there. While the window is open (which will float on top) you can optionally click any GameObject or Prefab to make the script be attached to that, and you can click any folder in the Project view to save the script in that folder. You can also pick which of the built-in callback functions you want included from the beginning (we only have four right now but we’ll add the others as well).

When you click “Create and Attach” the script will be created with the right file name and class name, compiled, and then added to your selected GameObject or Prefab if you chose one.

We’re also adding this partially related button:

 
The idea here is to just make it more obvious and simpler how to add a component to a GameObject – no need to reach for that menu anymore. And no, the button is not part of the AudioSource component, it’s below it and is still missing some style work and a separator line above it. It’s a work in progress!

We’re still missing more work on the script template building options, but I can already see that this thing will save me time in the future, if nothing else.

So, what are we working on? We started the day by compiling a preliminary list of projects and forming teams. Naturally this list could change, new projects could form, and projects could evolve. It is important to remember that this week is experimental — a weeklong extension of Unity’s “Fridays are For Fun” process — some projects will end up in the future versions of Unity… and some will crash and burn.

• Cheap colliding particles on the GPU
• Webkit-based welcome screen
• One-click web publishing
• Collaborative editing
• DirectX 11
• Vertex Painting
• Install Analytics
• Multithreaded Renderer
• NVIDIA Performance Profiling Extensions
• PhysX 3
• AI Sandbox
• Web camera support
• New Script dialog
• New terrain engine
• Supporting any .NET compiler
• Scene creation tools
• Assets Store game project
• Timeline editor
• Dynamic mixing of sounds based on dB
• Blendshape implementation

For more information during the week, head to unity3d.com/NinjaCamp, follow the #NinjaCamp hashtag on Twitter or check out updates on our Facebook page.

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!

Tuesday, March 1st, 10am to 6:15pm, Room 123 in the North Hall

Below is the schedule and description of our sessions. I will be posting more information on what’s happening at our booth later, but I hope to see you at our Unity Track!

Schedule

10-11:15am How to Make Money with Union & Technical Introduction to Unity3
Speakers: Brett Seyler, Tom Higgins, and Joe Robins
Brett Seyler, the General Manager of Union, will discuss what Union is all about and how Union can help developers make money.
You hear about Unity all the time, but never saw it in action? Always wanted to try it, but never got around to doing so? Tom and Joe will take you on a lightning tour of what Unity can do, and the platforms it can publish to, so you are well prepared to continue learning at the other Unity sessions.

11:15am-12:15pm Shader Authoring in Unity
Speakers: Shawn White & Robert Cupisz
It’s difficult to make a game today without writing at least one shader. Whether you’re indie, mainstream, or somewhere in the middle, having the ability to write your own shaders will give you what you need to make your game POP! Unity provides a suite of built-in shaders to get you started, but in this talk we’ll get you up to speed on what you need to know about writing your very own shaders in Unity.

12:15-1:45pm LUNCH

1:45-2:45pm Making the Unity Editor do what YOU want
Speakers: Nicholas Francis & Amir Ebrahimi
The extensibility of the Unity Editor is one of its great strengths.  Nicholas and Amir will show how to make the Unity Editor do exactly what you want, instead
of what the creators of Unity thought you wanted.

2:45-3:00pm BREAK

3-4:00pm Building a Better Asset Pipeline
Speakers: Adam Mechtley
With support for a variety of native file formats, Unity has one of the most streamlined asset pipelines for models, textures, and other game assets. This talk will focus on advanced techniques that users can use to extend Unity’s asset pipeline to automate tasks and enhance interoperability with other industry-standard software such as Autodesk Maya.

4:15-5:15pm How Electronic Arts uses Unity
Speakers: Carlos Barbosa
Carlos will discuss how Unity fits into the development workflow at EA Sports, and share their lessons learned from asset pipeline to distribution.

5:15-6:15pm Optimizing for Mobile and Programming Work Flow
Speakers: Erik Hemming & Lucas Meijer
Unity is a 100% C/C++ based game engine that allows gamecode to be written in c#. We’ll describe how this all works when targetting mobile devices, and how to achieve the best looking content with the tools available in Unity. The talk will touch on topics such as profiling and debugging, and also look at how to best optimize the content for a particular platform. We’ll discuss different hardware as well as software limitations of the different mobile devices, and how those affect your target audience.

I’m thrilled to join the Unity team as the new Developer Relations Director focused on our Union business unit. My enviable job is to work with our great developers to find and deliver games to emerging and existing markets through the technical, business and marketing services of Union.

In case you missed the big news this week, Sony Ericsson has announced an amazing gaming-centric Android phone called Xperia PLAY. Unity played a key role in their announcement, and you’ll hear more technical details around this partnership at the upcoming Game Developer Conference. As a brief overview, Unity worked with Sony Ericsson to expose their unique PlayStation style gaming controls through Unity’s Android support. Unity developers interested in learning more about our support for the Xperia PLAY in Unity can contact us at union@unity3d.com. You can also read more about our partnership at the Sony Ericsson’s Developer Blog.

Three of our hard working developers jumped at the chance to update their games with these controls and were previewed at the launch event. Our hearty thanks to Angry Mob Games, Luma Arcade and Art In Games for their quick and impressive efforts.

Union plays a unique role in this Sony Ericsson announcement. While all Android games built with Unity will work well with the Xperia PLAY, Sony Ericsson wants to see enhanced and differentiated games. Our developers participating in Union are the perfect targets, as they want their content to be best suited for new devices and platforms. Through the business and marketing strength of Union, we’re able to offer Sony Ericsson a steady stream of optimized games. These Union games will be highlighted to Xperia PLAY owners. And as we all know, titles which get visibility are much more likely to reach game players. It’s a true win-win for Union developers and Sony Ericsson.

The Union team will be attending the upcoming Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, Feb 28 – Mar 4, 2011. Please send us a meeting request at union@unity3d.com, or just stop by our tradeshow booth for a chat. And as always, drop us an email if you want to learn more and get involved with Union. We have many more exciting opportunities coming.

I look forward to seeing what you create with Unity!

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