In the Unite 2009 conference keynote we promised you that Unity would be picking up speed, and it has: Unity has become a powerhouse in the game industry and beyond. Nobody else is as active in democratizing sweet game technology to as many developers, and enabling them to target as many consumers. Unity has been used by well over 100,000 developers of all shapes and sizes to create thousands of games and other interactive 3D content that has touched over 40 million people.

We’re moving fast. Our engineering team now consists of 36 people (up from some 12 or so a year ago), and they are firing on all cylinders. We’ve continually released major updates with tons of features over the last years. We also started working on an Xbox 360 port, and recently blogged that our iPhone team is working on iPad support.

But those teams are just a handful of our people! So what else have we been up to? Thousands of code check ins have been done, many subsystems reworked, leading technologies integrated in Unity, and a massive automated testing suite implemented so that we can move as fast as we can.

In fact, here’s a historical graph of our code checkins:

As a project grows developers tend to check in less frequently, so the actual slope of work being done is much steeper.

Until today it was all hush-hush, but now we’re finally ready to announce our plans. Let it be known: for the last year we’ve been working on the next major release: the uber-cool Unity 3: unity3d.com/unity/coming-soon/unity-3

So far the only time frame we’ve promised is “summer 2010″, but we’ll be giving early beta access – and a discount – to anyone who pre-orders.

Also, we’ve just announced that Unity will add support for iPad, Android, Xbox 360, and PS3! That’s the kind of “author once, deploy anywhere” that has remained a developer’s wet dream for years. And not just from “one codebase”, but from one heck of a unified and polished IDE paired with the industry’s best asset pipeline!

I hope you’ll stick around with us, we’re only just getting started!

PS. Because we’re unifying the core Unity products with Unity iPhone (and all the other deployment targets too) the upgrade rules are a bit complicated and we haven’t done the best job at explaining them. We are working on this, please bear with us as we are inundated with questions – we will sort this all out and make it as clear as it can be in the near future.

With that out of the way, here’s what I actually had in mind – Looking at the event, Apple unveiled pretty much what most of us expected – but it wasn’t until a bit later that it hit me what is so great about this:

I’ve never before seen a computer that is so designed for consumers. It goes straight into the stream of iPod, iPod Touch, etc. Sure, it’s using general-purpose chips behind it, so it’s not like it can’t do “real” apps, but the focus is here 100% on consumers. That means games.

Apple has been taking games more and more seriously – I guess that started happening when they realized games were one of the main movers of iPod Touches. This means that as far as we’re concerned what we’re looking at is the launch of a new console. For indies it’s even better: Apple actually gets the whole “make life sweet for developers” – so it’s a platform that you can make games on and you can even earn money – all major console’s stores are simply embarassing compared to the AppStore. In short, on iPod/Pad/Phone the hoops you have to go through to develop, publish and get paid are crazy low. If you’re one of those people who think the submission process is slow/bad/bloated, just try becoming a registered developer with Sony or Microsoft

Naturally, we want to be there the moment it happens. Whenever new and exciting platforms come out, we want to be there. Our goal is to let our users publish anywhere. We can’t support all platforms instantly, but Apple have had an uncanny ability to produce hits. With the iPad I think they’ve done it again.

So we are scrambling like mad to get support for it. On the iPhone our guys worked round the clock to get it out – hopefully that won’t be neccessary this time, but we’d always rather burn some midnight oil than end up like the large behemoth we’re currently seeing on the sidelines – 18 months after iPhone launch with no shipped support for this platform mumbling OMG! The Net Is Broken

You may have heard about Fun Fridays here at Unity HQ. Those of us who were giving the talks thought it would be a good idea to spend some Fridays to make a small game that we could use as a visual aid. This turned out to be a great idea. We created new material to help teach new Unity users, and those of us who worked on it have a really fun game to share with friends, family, and the community! I’d like to share this game with you now… We call it Granny Theft Tofu and you can play it in the embedded webplayer below.

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

The goal is to get yourself to the Tofu shop and back home again before time runs out, all while causing as much traffic carnage as possible. Arrow keys will move Granny around. And there’s an easter egg in the game too; an Amiga graphics mode.  See if you can find it!

I’m incredibly happy to have helped create this game! I think everybody on the team learned something about Unity that they didn’t know before. It was also nice to sit down with Unity as a user once again, and help others learn what it is and what makes it so special. I hope you’ll all enjoy the game, and perhaps walk away inspired.

Take Advantage of Diverse Opportunities
First and foremost, the ability to have flexible publishing options allows developers to take full advantage of the opportunities that are available. What I mean by “opportunities” is that the number of viable publishing channels is on the rise, not only can developers host their own web content but they can leverage existing game portal websites, social media sites like Facebook, MySpace and many others, and of course they can look towards the booming mobile gaming market as well. The ability to easily target any or all of those channels gives developers an advantage and will allow them to make the most of each channel’s strengths in order to drive success of their titles and increase their revenue across the board.

Reach Your Users Everywhere
Following along with the above is the fact that the gaming market is shifting quite a bit, and it’s doing so in a way that makes it even more important to have games available to users through as many different channels as possible. The days of users playing games on dedicated platforms like gaming consoles or strictly desktop based aren’t gone, but there is an increasing focus and interest in games that offer portability and many points of access. At our Unite 2009 developer conference, Richard Hilleman from Electronic Arts helped drive the point home that as game developers you’re looking at having to fight for small slices of people’s time on the go more than ever, so offering them easy access to content is paramount. What that means is that your games shouldn’t be web-based or mobile-based, they should be available in as many ways as possible so users can dip in and dip out and enjoy your games wherever and whenever they like. Having easy publishing access to multiple platforms will allow you to meet the changing needs of game players and keep you ahead of the competition.

Just imagine having someone play your game online at work, then again on their smart phone on the train ride home and then yet again on their desktop later that night. Through it all you’re offering a single combined experience through multiple points of entry, letting your users access it when and where they want!

Use a Stable and Consistent Platform
The third important item of note is that it’s key to not only find a tool that allows you to reach a variety of platforms, but to find one that lets you do so efficiently and effectively, while still being able to deliver premiere content that game players will be attracted to. This is where Unity shines above all others, it provides developers with a solid technology base that allows for rapid development on top of providing fantastic performance and high-quality results. The lesson here is that you, the developer, can leverage your design and development expertise to the fullest extent as we will focus on the engine while you focus on your games!

Examples
Of course all of this might seem like a dose of marketing hot air without some specific examples, so allow me to point to a few Unity-authored games that are already spanning multiple platforms to help prove the point.

Downhill Bowling
Downhill Bowling is a game from the folks at Game Resort and it’s a title that’s available online as well as on the iPhone and iPod touch via the App Store. The game’s initial launch was done on the web via both addictinggames.com and shockwave.com, but when we released our iPhone support in the fall of 2008 it didn’t take long for the game to make it’s way on to the AppStore.

• Downhill Bowling (addictinggames.com)
• Downhill Bowling (shockwave.com)
• Downhill Bowling Lite (AppStore, Free)
• Downhill Bowling (AppStore, $2.99)

Max & the Magic Marker
This game is a bit different in that it doesn’t explicitly target two platforms for commercial distribution, rather it uses one, WiiWare,for commercial distribution and another, the web, for pre-release and preview plays. The game was created by Press Play and will release as a WiiWare title in Europe today (Friday, January 22, 2009) and in other markets soon. But at the same time there is a web playable demo available on the game’s destination site.

• Max & the Magic Marker (maxandthemagicmarker.com)

Tumbledrop
The third example I’d like to cite is Tumbledrop, a great little game produced by a single developer that was at first part of the Unity
Awards 2008 as a web game, then rebranded for Cartoon Network for posting on line and now most recently it’s come out on the iPhone.

• Tumbledrop 6teen (cartoonnetwork.com)
• Tumbledrop (AppStore, $1.99)

In all three of the examples above the authoring effort was largely done once and then the Unity engine’s portability was used to easily reach out to secondary platforms. Of course it wasn’t truly an “author once” experience as each of the platforms does need some special handling, notably in terms of input types (keyboard/mouse, multi-touch/accelerometer, WiiMote/Nunchuck) and tweaking of artwork, but the core game logic in each case was able to be reused with relative ease.

In Summary…
Of course there are other examples out there that could have been cited, it’s just that the three above are particularly noteworthy and so I mentioned them here. So it’s not just hype, Unity truly does allow you to quickly, easily and effectively reach out and target multiple platforms thus ensuring a greater chance of success regardless of the type of content you make. Of course our job as a tool vendor is never truly done and so we’ll keep working our way forward until we can in fact offer a 100% “author once, deploy anywhere” experience. The only question is whether you’ll be along for the ride or not, and I of course think you should do yourself a favor and get on board now!

If you’re a developer that is already using Unity to create content that spans multiple platforms then let me know as I’d love to hear from you. You can do that by adding a comment in response to this post, or by contacting me directly by email (tom@unity3d.com). Otherwise if you’re not already doing that then I encourage you to consider starting to do so as soon as possible.

Any talk about mobile will start with the iPhone – it’s the device that really showed even disbelievers like me that you do want a general-purpose computer-like device in your pocket. The iPhone has been great for us – we got in on it early and let our users publish to it – adding “quite a few” users in the process. We’ve now shipped 6 versions and over 500 Unity appstore games have been launched. Pretty much whenever anyone does a list of top-something-or-other on iPhone games, you can spot a couple of Unity-powered games.

What games are people playing on the iPhone? From what I’ve heard based on data from ingame ad networks, an interesting trend is surfacing: iPhones are typically used for play sessions of around one hour – mainly in the evenings. If iPhones are really giving traditional consoles a fight in their own turf, this means that mobile devices have a huge future in the gaming space as well.
So how will all this play out? I expect that over the next few years we’ll see a bunch of mobile platforms appear. Some of these will stay and quite a few more will die – in the end, I wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up with iPhone, Android and a third player. Obviously, we want our customers to be able to deploy their games to as many platforms as possible – this means that we could be adding support for some that will possibly go away in the end – that’s ok. While platform fragmentation is annoying to us, the ease of targetting multiple platforms is something we’ve always held close to our heart. Maybe we’ll suffer a bit when porting, but at least it’s only us and not all the people that just want to get creative. It’s our unofficial slogan: We suffer, so you don’t have to.

Some of you have probably seen the announcement that we’re going to support NVidia’s Tegra 2 chipset. This is the first of various things we’re ready to announce and also says something about how we see the world: there’s chipsets and OSes (and then there’s the physical devices). We work on supporting a chipset (like SGX/ARM for iPhone) and we work on supporting an OS (Windows, MacOSX, iPhoneOSX). Behind the huge range of mobile devices mentioned above, there’s a somewhat smaller list of stacks: Broadcom, Qualcomm, Apple, NVidia Tegra – with an OS on top: iPhoneOSX, Windows CE, Linux, Android, etc. those are the ones that are real work for us to support – but once we have some more of these, adding new devices shouldn’t be that hard.

And then there’s the Apple tablet (sure, there’s others – but who really cares?). I expect it to be OSX-based, probably some SGX/ARM chipset – while I know as little as anyone else, I’m basically thinking of an oversized & clocked iPhone 3GS. Supporting it will be some pain, but nothing major (these things are hard to say – half the time on the original iPhone port was spent on one single issue).

Either way, I think gaming on mobile platforms are going to be huge, and I think we’re small and nimble enough to be among the very first with support for many of these platforms. If any of you are going to GDC, I’d love to meet up and chat about these things – drop by our booth (or failing that, there’s a wonderful comment thingy below this post).

Without further ado.

The Year of Gamification, Part 1
We call the adoption of game technology and game design methods outside of the games industry “gamification”, and this is a really broad trend.

Unity and other game technologies are being used across more than a dozen sectors that have little or nothing to do with games. Architectural visualization is an obvious and older example. But apart from that we have some of the world’s biggest engineering and manufacturing companies, as well as several actual armed forces as our customers. TV production companies use Unity and other game engines to produce live TV shows and Machinima videos. Big corporations make employee training and simulation applications using Unity, and some of our customers have gone into online meeting and collaboration. Game technology being applied to all these areas means that Unity users are valuable to many and not everyone has to make a living from games.

Action item: Sell your skills outside the games industry. With a knowledge of other industries, you can create new and innovative products or businesses servicing these industries. The sky’s the limit.

The Year of Gamification, Part 2
A second aspect of gamification is that game design methods and strategies are being used outside of games to design better products and user experiences. A boring site like Mint.com has experimented with turning personal finance into a game, social networking experiment FourSquare maintains high-score lists for people who bar-crawl, and natural-language search startup Siri hired an accomplished game designer to design their user experience.

Action item: Learn game design and apply it to everything – how people sign up for a website, how people “succeed” in using your product, how customers share it with their friends and become leaders of user groups/clans, etc. Game design can be used for all of this.

Another Golden Age for Garage Developers
We are definitely going to see even more quality games done by small teams in 2010. With very little risk and by mainly investing their own time, a small team of 1-2 people can make a hit game that will sell millions of units. More importantly (and what makes this different than 4 years ago), there are now many more channels through which to distribute and sell such a game. Many such games are receiving world-wide acclaim.

Action item: Find an awesome partner and go create!

Publishers Continue to be Valuable
With casual, online and mobile games requiring smaller production budgets and eschewing retail (and thus expensive and slow) distribution in exchange for digital, the game industry was expecting to get rid of the publisher as a concept.

But as the iPhone ecosystem clearly proves (as well as the web somewhat less clearly with portals like Shockwave.com and distribution companies like Zynga and RockYou), the publishers stay. Though they may not be forwarding cash and fully owning the game IPs, their expertise in marketing, game design and online distribution metrics and strategies make them a valuable, if no longer totally required, partner to the game developer.

Action item: Consider working with a publisher. Fortunately with publishers’ leverage lessened, they are typically less demanding with regards to what they have to own (IP, sequel rights, revenue share). Or become your own publisher by building that expertise. This is not a simple task, but has been done by some of the top online game developers.

Everything Becomes a “Console”
This one is somewhat controversial. It seemed that with the move towards mobile and web, the closed ecosystems of the console world would be under siege and eventually collapse. What game developer (except perhaps the ones most entrenched in with the Nintendos-Microsoft-Sony trinity) hasn’t fantasized about this walled garden having its walls rammed down?

Well, welcome to the new world. The iPhone has proven that given the right amount of “openness”, neither consumers nor developers really mind closed platforms.

Even on the anarchic web (regions of which remind one more of a Mad-Maxian post-apocalyptical cyberspace than an enlightened utopia), Facebook is in the process of creating a closed environment within which consumers and game developers can meet and exchange fun and money (more or less) safely.

This section could also have been labeled “the Rise of the AppStore Model”, since it’s more the App Store than the gaming console which inspires this megatrend. And framed like that, it might have made people happy. But this is a problematic trend (to say the least) that should make us stop to think.

Action item: Make use of this. Or if you’re brave, build your own!

Facebook Wallet, Apple Tablet, Unity on Facebook
And then are the obvious ones.

Of course Apple will launch its tablet. We even know the screen-size and CPU make. The only uncertainly left is what day it launches. And its price.

Surely Facebook will launch a payment platform which in tandem with Facebook Connect will dramatically transform the face of microtransactions on the internet. If they do this right, it will finally enable the web-wide microtransactions which we’ve been dreaming of since the dot-com era.

And of course Unity will be big on Facebook. Several major games will get launched on Facebook, offering awesome games to hundreds of millions of people (not to mention significantly moving the needle on adoption of the Unity plugin).

Action item: Left as an exercise for the reader

So, 2009 has been an amazing year. I won’t list out all our achievements, but they’ve been many, and some big enough that achieving just one of them would have made us very proud.

But just in time for the Holiday season, Unity Technologies has been selected as one of the 5 top gaming companies by Game Developer Magazine. According to them, this puts us in a pretty interesting family of Apple, Epic, Valve and Zynga. A cute detail is that we’re by far the smallest. And (apart from Zynga) also the youngest.

Without gushing too much I want to thank you my incredible colleagues (who worked so hard to make this all happen) and our users for this.

Both groups have more than tripled this year, so there’s a constant stream of new faces, new histories and backgrounds, and of course amazing new skills being added to the mix. I guess that part is what makes me love my job the most.

Thanks.

The news, the great news, just keeps on coming! Recently the folks at Kongregate.com announced their new Konduit Platform and one of the cool benefits of that news is that they are now open to non-Flash game content, and that of course means they’re open to Unity content! While it’s always cool to read about new possibilities, nothing speaks louder than action and so hot on the heels of the Konduit announcement was the recent acceptance of not one but two Unity titles on their site! The Unity games that are now live are Big Fun Racing and Bubble Bang, both of which come from Decane/Martin Schultz. Now that Martin and Kongregate.com have paved the way for others to follow, who’s next?

If you’re keen on giving it all a look for yourself then here are a few important links:

Kongregate.com

Kongregate.com’s Developer Center

Kongregate.com’s Konduit Platform

Once more, kudos to Martin for leading the way and props to Kongregate.com for opening their doors to a variety of technologies. That open door is good for us as a tech provider just as much as it is for game players wanting diverse game types/genres. Exciting times to say the least!

I’m pleased to announce that we released Unity iPhone 1.5.1 yesterday.  Unity iPhone 1.5.1 includes improved XCode support and improved AssetBundle support, but more importantly Native APIs (NSGetEnviron and exc_server functions) have been removed to comply with new Apple requirements, previously reported by Joachim here.

This release also removes the requirement for prospective users to write to our sales staff for an *evaluation copy, you can now just go directly to our download page to try it out for yourself!

For more details about Unity iPhone 1.5.1, please check out the release notes.

*Note: Unity iPhone is currently only for use with Mac OS X and you’ll need to be a registered iPhone developer with the paid version of the SDK to properly evaluate the product.