Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

Some time ago we’ve announced our third Unite conference.

The conference will have many Unity employees, as well as Unity users, giving presentations, to share their experience with the conference’s attendees. In order to make sure we get the best line up of speakers possible, we’re calling out to the Unity community:

We would like to invite everyone who would want to give a presentation at Unite 2009, to send a speaking proposal to speakingatunite@unity3d.com. We will select the speakers who we feel can give presentations most useful to the conference’s attendees. That might be you!

We are looking for a wide range of topics. All publishing platforms, all disciplines (programming, design, workflow, business), content for beginners, content for advanced users. We will seriously look at all proposals made. Surprise us.

We’d like the proposals to contain, at minimum, an outline of what you would talk about, as well as the kind of audience it’s aimed at (beginners, artists, etc). Presentation slots are maximum 45-50 minutes long.

The presentations will be videotaped, and placed on our website. You can find the sessions from the previous two events here. If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch with speakingatunite@unity3d.com to get them answered.

The deadline for your speaking proposal submission is Wednesday the 16th of September.

We have a ton of people at Unity who have been or are involved in the demoscene. Assembly is one of the largest demoscene parties, and this year we were sponsoring the event, sent in some folks there and had a couple of seminar presentations. Our presentations were not directly Unity related, but still might be interesting for some of you.

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Submissions for the 2009 Unity Awards are now open! Our goal is to honor the very best content being made in Unity. If you’ve been working hard on a project, now is you chance to earn some recognition–and some prize money–for your efforts!

Check out the official contest information and rules page for all of the details you need to know. We look forward to your entries!

*update: We’re putting information about each of the entries that we receive in this forum post.

Hi guys & gals.

I’m giving a talk about the inner workings of immediate-mode GUIs at GDC Europe tomorrow (in Cologne). Looking forward to doing it – it’s been my main Unity development area for the past 2 years, so I guess I somehow ended up being an expert on that subject It’s Monday at 2:10 – 3:00 PM

If any of you are there, I hope you come – and if you want to meet up in Cologne, drop me a mail or a PM on our forum, and I’ll try to squeeze you in.

After a crazy week featuring not one but three separate events crammed into the span of one week (plus this past week of travel and catching up) I’m finally back to having my head above water and thought I’d take another minute to share a few more thoughts with y’all.This time I’m here to talk about the Unity TGIF and Unity Skills Workshop events held in Vancouver this past weekend on Friday July 24th and Saturday July 25th.

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

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

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

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

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

And last but definitely not least…

bootup labs

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

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After a crazy week featuring not one but three separate events crammed into the span of one week I’m finally coming up for air and thought I’d take a minute to share some thoughts with y’all. The first of those events was the longest and most involved and that was last week’s Casual Connect Seattle conference.

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

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

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

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

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Man, what a week! GDC ‘09 has now slipped past us and slowly we’re recovering and getting our heads back above water. I thought I’d take a few minutes and share some thoughts from our end about the incredible week we just had. Not only did GDC prove useful for us as fellow members of the larger game development community, but it also proved useful for us as a technology provider as we had a great showing both on and off the expo floor. Needless to say we’ll be back at GDC again as they always prove to be an amazing time for us on all levels.

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I suppose that this may technically be round number 2 as we tried this once already, but we had short notice (even shorter than this round) and only Sam and I were online to play. So let’s call this round 1 and get it right! I’m keen on getting together with the Unity community every so often and playing various games online. For this round we’ll be playing Halo 3 on the XBox 360 but over time we will expand the repertoire to include Unity games, other console games, etc., variety is the spice of life y’know! If you’re interested in playing some time, and you have any specific requests for other games/platforms then feel free to share those in a comment below.

Unity Community Online Gaming: Round 1
Platform/Game: XBox 360 / Halo 3
Date/Start Time: Saturday, February 28th / 10am PST

If you’re interested in playing then please let me know by either adding a comment below or by writing me at tom(at)unity3d(dot)com. When doing so please let me know your XBox Live Gamer Tag as well as your Unity Community Forums handle (if you’re a member). I will update this post with information as necessary.

It’s on!

After a two week visit to Europe I’m now back in San Francisco and settling into my regular work habits once again. My recent business trip had me visiting company headquarters in Copenhagen for one week, then spending most of the second week in Germany attending Casual Connect Hamburg. The conference was great for us as an attending sponsor and for us as geeks in the game industry in general. We spent most of our time either attending to our sponsor table, having specific one-on-one meetings or enjoying lots of social time at various meet-ups and bar events. Through it all we managed to chat up a number of folks, including some existing users, lots of potential new users and a slew of people with various technology of interest to anyone using Unity. I have to offer my thanks to Luke Burtis and Jessica Tams of the Casual Games Association for putting on another fantastic conference!

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Me, Tom Higgins and Joe Santos will be driving off to Hamburg in a couple of hours (and staying through Thursday). See you at our booth at Casual Connect, in Hall G silver table 9.

We’re also hosting a bar meetup on Wednesday night, done in conjunction with the Nordic Games folks. Whether you’re attending the conference or not, join us at Zoé 2 / Sofabar, Neuer Pferdemarkt 17, Hamburg. The event starts at 7:30pm until late.

http://europe.casualconnect.org/