Unite 2012: Day 3 summary

The morning after our annual Unite party is never the easiest, and 2012 proved to be no different. A fantastic event at Amsterdam’s gorgeous Muziekgebouw concert hall brought all Unite attendees together for
a night to remember, with spectacular views over the old city and a spacious bar overlooking the River IJ.
The night began with the Unite 2012 Awards Ceremony, which honored the developers creating the best videogames and interactive apps using Unity. And without further ado, this year's winners are:

Golden Cube - Total War Battles by The Creative Assembly and SEGA
Community Choice - Dead Trigger by Madfinger Games
Best Gameplay - Beat Sneak Bandit by Simogo
Best Visual Experience - Escape Plan by FunBits and SCEA
Best Technical Achievement - Dead Trigger by Madfinger Games
Best Student Game - Pulse by Team Pixel Pi from the Vancouver Film School
Best Serious Game - Powers of Minus Ten by Green Eye Visualization
Best Non-game - Bats! Furry Fliers of the Night by Bookerella and Story
Worldwide

The judging for the awards was done by the Unity Technologies team over a series of several weeks; nominees were then narrowed down to a group of finalists, which were then voted on in a blind poll. Open nominations for the next Unity Awards will begin in Spring 2013.

Its worth noting that this year we had by far the hardest selection of games to pick winners from. Each and every game that made it as a finalist is a superb example of the flexibility of Unity and the incredible work the community is doing with the engine. I would recommend going over to the full finalists page to really get a sense of the great work that is being done.

The Unity award-winning team of Renaud Charpentier, Nick Farley and Mattijs van Delden kicked off the final day of Unite with the show’s first session. Their talk, entitled Design, Code and Art: Total War Battles Postmortem, discussed how the team put together their Unite-award-winning RTS, and shared some key workflow tips that they learned during the game’s 18-month development cycle.

Meanwhile, a series of roundtables throughout the day discussed a broad range of topics, from how to go about PR and pitching media editors for coverage of your game, to a dialogue about building and optimizing your gaming experience in the Cloud. Palmer Luckey showed off his game-changing Oculus Rift VR headset
(and talked about how to create Unity games in for it), while Unity’s Lucas Meijer, Na’Tosha and Levi Bard talked about Linux and Flash publishing in Unity 4.0. Not to mention talks from Microsoft, Interactive Lab, Universe Sandbox and many more.

And that’s it for another fantastic Unite. We’ll be releasing videos of Unite 2012 sessions through the coming weeks, so stay tuned for that. See you all again next year!

Here is a super awesome video to give those who were unable to attend a little insight into how things were this year. It really gives a sense for what the event is like.

I look forward to seeing you next time, if not sooner :)