1. Ravensword: The Fallen King -- arguably the best RPG game on iPhone so far!




2. Star Wars Trench Run -- official Star Wars title.
3. Skee Ball -- successor to 10 Cups 7 Balls
4. Little Runner -- now with Doodle Jump Easter Egg!
5. Scarecrow -- 2nd App Store hit from Ezone.com guys.

… and yeah, Ravensword is really amazing!

We want to try one more thing… On Friday work on something cool.

I think there are a lot of low hanging fruits in Unity where somebody with drive can just do something cool that pushes us forward. Things that are hard to put in words, but just make sense when you see it done.

So every Friday, developers can work on something cool, something they have been craving to do for a long time. A feature, a demo, a tutorial, a video tutorial, docs, cleaning the toilet, something on the website. Whatever. Be creative, push the envelope.

In other words, we started to work on “anything cool” on Fridays. This was dubbed as FAFF (Fridays Are For Fun).

Boy, what a positive effect on team morale that was!

It also resulted in some FAFF work being polished & promoted into official releases already. Things like:

• Animation Events in Unity 2.6 animation editor
• Display realtime brush preview in terrain editing tools
• Timeline Charts for Unity 2.6 profiler
• Custom Icons for standalone game builds
• Head Look Controller sample project
• Precise raycast-based snapping in Unity 2.6

…all started out as Friday projects!

Developers have experimented with lots of other stuff on Fridays. Some of them were just playing around or learning Unity better. Some Fridays were for evaluating various middleware packages, implementing some features or doing some fancy R&D. Some of the projects were an interesting kind of “fun”. Like improving internal build farm setup, a system for better tracking of crash reports, improving the website, or other similar things that often involve Perl scripts. Well, eveyone has his own kind of fun

So yeah. On Fridays, we just ignore the schedule and work on something cool. Something that pushes our own tech – something that we can’t defend from a business standpoint but that’s just too great to not get done. If it rocks, we’ll ship it. Because, at the end of the day – who knows where the next killer idea will come from.

This is just the latest picture in what has become a company tradition: To take a group photo whenever enough of us are gathered at the same place.

This photo was taken little more than half a year earlier at GDC in San Francisco:

And again half a year before that at Unite 2008 in Copenhagen:

This one was taken two years ago at Unite 2007 (although we cheated and included Unity Studios in the lineup as well.)

And finally around year 2005, just around the release of Unity 1.0, we had this photo taken:

As you can see, our little company has been growing almost constantly. And it still is. Only in the two weeks since we returned from Unite 2009, we have added 3 employees to the staff list!! Do you think there’s room for your face in next year’s group photo? Take a look at our jobs page and see which positions we have open.

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!

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

Also some of the Unity guys were waiting for the big event!

Then we were able to get into the room, everyone was very excited!

Finally the keynote started! Big news about Unity 2.6 and Unity indie becoming free!

Our special guest from EA finished the keynote.

After the keynote Joachim, Lucas and Joe Robins showed us new things in 2.6 (the profiler and the new animation system).

Then after the “new things in Unity 2.6″ talk, we got our lunch, and some people came to our open mic and showed off their projects.

After that there were more talks, but the battery of my camera died

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s photos!

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!

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.

Bas Smit unpacking, and getting ready for helping set up the event.

Some of the Unity crew helping out with the lanyards.

Both talks started at the same time; above is seen Aras’ talk about image effects and Tom Higgins with his basic introduction to Unity.

All the conference center was full.

After Aras’ talk, Nicholas started his talk about UnityGUI.

Then after Nicholas finished his talk it was lunch time! We where all pretty hungry!

Everyone was chilling out at lunch, but not the Unity crew!

Then, finally Joachim and Lucas began the performance optimization talk showing the profiler that is coming in 2.6!

At the end Lucas and Joachim solved some questions about the performance optimization talk.

Stay tuned for more images tomorrow!

]]> http://blogs.unity3d.com/2009/10/28/unite-09-day-1/feed/ 11 http://blogs.unity3d.com/2009/10/26/preparing-unite/ http://blogs.unity3d.com/2009/10/26/preparing-unite/#comments Sun, 25 Oct 2009 23:02:46 +0000 Nicholas Francis http://blogs.unity3d.com/?p=1602 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…

Unity makes game development accessible to a broad audience, but creating awesome games is not always enough in itself. Luckily, there’s lots of articles and blog posts about how to get games noticed. We have linked to some of the best in this blog post.

One important point raised in several of the articles is that building buzz and making sure your game gets noticed is something you should start doing long before your game is released. So if you’re thinking “Well before I think of spreading awareness I first need to actually make my game LOL”, well, then you’re probably mistaken.

Go on, read on!

How To Use And Abuse The Gaming Press And How The Gaming Press Wants To Use and Abuse You.
Kieron Gillen has written an excellent article on how to get your game in the gaming press – from the insider point of view of a gaming press journalist.

The secret is that we actually want to write about you. When someone has a phenomenal amount of work to do before the nineteen day clock ticks down to deadline, anyone able to present them something interesting to fill their pages saves them an amount of work. While games writers try to stay aware of what’s happening in the games scene, and will go after anything that attracts their attention, by going after the games press you hugely increase your chance for favourable coverage.

Building Buzz for Indie Games
Paul Tayler has written an article on how to build buzz that discusses such things as building a following around your game, writing a good press release, doing maintenance and keeping momentum post-release, doing previews and release hype, and how to handle reviews. Some things in the article should be taken with a grain of salt, but there are a lot of good bits in there.

Marketing anything takes a lot of time and effort. Most small indies skew their efforts far too far towards production and away from marketing: this is one of the reasons why so few are a genuine commercial success, and why many high-quality games generate minimal revenue.

The Zero Budget Indie Marketing Guide
Rodain Joubert has written an article on marketing targeted at small indie teams. He writes about being visible in the indie games community, the importance of a nice presentation of your game in trailer videos and announcements, getting feedback from players, and about the importance of knowing the game media.

This guide is for anybody who has a nice game under their belt and wants to give it some more exposure. It doesn’t matter if you’re just a two-bit dev submitting simple concepts to some backwater forum. In fact, it’s probably better if you are: this article is geared towards you, and can help you make the most of something that would otherwise disappear into the murky undercity of the Internet.

Forums
An easy way to increase your exposure in the indie community is to participate in the various forums dedicated to indie game development.

Unity Forums
The Unity forums are of course the best place to discuss Unity game development specifically. The community is very friendly and helpful.

Indie Gamer Forums
The Indie Gamer Forums have forums for anything from announcements and portfolios to business, game design, and indie lifestyle. Also follow the blog.

TIGSource Forums
TIGForums have forums dedicated to GDC, TIGJams, announcements, the quirky TIGSource competitions, and more. Also follow the blog.

Don’t Forget us when You’ve Become Rich and Famous…
One last thing – for a long time, Unity became increasingly popular, largely without a marketing budget, dependent mostly on word of mouth and presence in the indie community, much like the techniques described above. Here at Unity Technologies, it always gives us a warm fuzzy feeling when people mention in announcements, press releases, interviews, or other public communications that they used Unity to make their game. Nobody is obligated to do this, it just makes us happy when people help spread awareness of Unity. In the end it also gives us even more resources (mentally and financially) to keep making Unity even better and provide top notch support.

*) we do not know all iPhone games made with Unity, so if your game is not listed here, please, let us know!

These games are in TOP100 GAME charts at the moment:

1. BATTLE BEARS




2. Zombieville USA
3. Castle Warriors
4. Samurai: Way of the Warrior
5. Monster Trucks Nitro

These games sold enough to be in TOP100 last week:

1. BATTLE BEARS
2. Zombieville USA
3. RC Heli -- Indoor Racing

Go, Indie, go!