Archive for the ‘General’ Category

The new year has hardly begun and it’s already been incredible, I say that as it feels to me like Unity and Unity content are in the news a lot as of late. While I know that those of us at Unity Technologies have been firm in our belief that Unity is the best thing going in game development, I think a lot of the recent media coverage and content launches are helping to show that’s really the case. Given that, I thought I’d take a minute and point out some of the recent media mentions for others to check out and perhaps share some of your own. Enjoy.

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Now that we’re a week deep into 2009 I thought I’d share a few of my new year’s resolutions, at least those that pertain to Unity in particular.

1. I will post more regularly here on my blog. I’ve often found myself excited by various bits of information from the Unity universe yet I’ve not been good about coming here and sharing that info for all to read and enjoy. Some times that information will be tidbits I glean from public sources and in other cases it may come from internal sources and thus be “extra juicy” for those outside the company walls.
    
2. I will make sure that I’m more available to the community in general, specifically by being more active on the forums and the IRC channel than I was in the closing months of 2008. Customer service and contact with the community are two key agenda items for us and I’m the point man for those efforts so I’ll do better in 2009 and beyond.
    
3. I will focus on specific community building agenda, including things like trying to form and interact with local user groups, improve the forums (finally!), coordinate student related events, and on and on and on. The Unity community is fantastic, but as it continues to grow (wait for the stampede of Windows content authors!) we’ll need to do more to ensure that it continues to be a healthy, happy and productive.
    

There is a ton more to do in 2009 but I want to focus my “promises” on the above. I think that those three resolutions are ones that will offer the most “bang for the buck” and so I’m here to commit to them in earnest. I’m here to share information, support our users in every way possible and continue to build and strengthen an already awesome community.

Am I on track folks? And what are your Unity-related resolutions?

I wish everyone all the best in 2009, let’s rock!

…I had recently arrived in Copenhagen (read more here) to begin this journey called “Unity”. One year ago I was thrilled by the fact that we’d grown so much in just a single year, and now looking back at the last twelve months I’m again stunned, shocked and thoroughly excited at what we’ve been able to do. In the two years I’ve been working at OTEE/Unity Technologies we’ve grown from a team of six, huddled in one small office sitting nearly on top of each other, to over thirty people between two companies in four different office locations and in three countries. And the scariest/best part is that I firmly believe that our ship has barely set sail, we have so much more to do and so much further to go!

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For those who haven’t seen it, The Graveyard (from the folks at Tale of Tales) is a unique and intriguing experiment of sorts that blurs the line between artwork, games and interactive experiences. It first cropped up on the Unity Community Forums some time ago and now there is a great postmortem write up on gamasutra.com that spans ten pages. In the postmortem they walk from concept on through to completion and talk about things that went right, wrong and otherwise. For anyone using Unity or working in the interactive 3D space it should prove to be an interesting read so go give it a look!

Postmortem: Tale of Tales’ The Graveyard

I was recently made aware of a great new game made in Unity called Sommersault. It’s a very cool game that was developed in part by Jonas Echterhoff, a long-time friend and part-time employee for Unity Technologies and Unity Studios. The game features some interesting and fun game play and it recently took second place in the European Innovative Games Awards. If you’ve got a few minutes take a look and have some fun, it’s definitely worth the time.

It’s time once again for the 11th annual GameDeveloper Front Line Awards and Unity is a candidate in the Engines category! There are six categories in all, each of which has five candidate products/tools nominated for your consideration: Art, Audio, Books, Engines, Middleware, and Programming/Production Tools. Everyone please go vote for your favorite tools (ahem, Unity!) by going to their online survey form today.

The guys at Flashbang Studios are a smart and hard working crew that continues to churn out lots of cool ideas and content. For those that missed it they recently went live with their own Unity-centric game portal website, blurst.com:

So far they went live with a soft-launch as the site isn’t completely filled out just yet, there will be community features and hopefully lots of cool games. Give it a look and stay tuned future updates from Flashbang. Keep it up guys!

Almost a month ago I said we’re preparing reports of Unity Web Player hardware statistics.

Well, here they are: unity3d.com/webplayer/hwstats

Operating system versions, desktop resolutions, graphics driver versions, shader models, memory sizes and some more. All broken down by quarter so some sort of “trends” can be seen (sure, changes can be caused by general hardware change or simply different people groups playing different games).

Enjoy!

Pretty much everyone knows Valve’s hardware survey – it’s a very valuable resource that shows what hardware the typical “hardcore PC gamer” has (that is, gamers that play Valve’s games).

However, the “casual gamer”, which is what Unity games are mostly targeted at, probably has slightly different hardware. “Slightly” being a very relative term of course.

Lo and behold – we have a glimpse into that data.
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…I was on a plane bound for Copenhagen, a city I’d never been to in order to start working with a bunch of people I’d never met (other than talking with David over the phone). I had left Adobe wanting to find something new, something that would be more promising in terms of real-time 3D and games was concerned, and I was hoping to find all that at OTEE (now known as Unity Technologies). It all began a few months before that flight in late August of 2006, I had already announced my pending departure from Adobe to the Director user community and was only a few days away from leaving Adobe for good.

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