Open Projects: Embark on an open source gamedev journey with us

While game development is a rewarding adventure, working as a team is an effective way of tackling the many challenges along the way. We’d like to invite you to embark on that journey with us in Unity’s first open-source game development program.

Unity’s Creator and Developer Advocacy team is dedicated to providing great sessions and demos for you to learn from. We’re not able to meet in person this year, but we still want to connect with our community of creators.

One way to share in our common experience is through game development itself. We created the “Open Projects” to give you a taste of a realistic game project where you have the freedom to get hands on in your areas of expertise, try out new skills, or just sit back and learn.

With the Open Projects, we want to expose the game development journey as it unfolds, and welcome you to the team as an active participant. As such, the Open Projects are open source and hosted on Github, where you can follow their development as it happens. Take part by contributing code, graphics, audio, or any kind of asset.

Still, you are not on your own. Our team at Unity will build the plan, provide graphics and sound, drive the development forward, and tackle the hardest challenges. We’ll be in it together!

A lot of the collaboration will take place in the Unity Forums. You can head over to the dedicated subforum to pitch ideas for the game and interact with our team and with the rest of the community.

If you want to get involved, make sure to read the Contribution Guidelines to understand how to contribute to the Open Projects.

For the very first Open Project, we chose a classic game genre: the action-adventure. We established a basic premise, and contracted a great concept artist to produce some drawings to give shape to some of the characters and scenery.

We also started the development of the game, so you won’t find an empty repository. But we still have far to go.

You can go ahead and download the project now.

Another key piece of the Open Projects is project management. For this, we have a public roadmap (built with a fantastic tool from our friends at Codecks). This is your point of reference for tracking what we have accomplished and where we are heading.

You can head to the roadmap now and see what inspires you. Can you contribute code or a 3D model? Will you focus on fixing a bug? Do you want to try your hand at testing? You’ll discover that all roles are integral to the development process.

The goal is not to create an entire game, but a sample of one – a “vertical slice.” You can imagine it as the demo that a small indie team would use to pitch their concept to publishers or to kick off a Kickstarter campaign. There is some content representing the final quality, the gameplay is functional, but it’s just a taste of the final product.

Once we are done, we will create a launch trailer for the game and put the final result on Steam, crediting everyone that took part in the process in detail. It’s a nice portfolio piece for students or whoever is taking their first steps in game development.

As we go through this journey, we will come together every two weeks to look at what we have accomplished and determine what we need to do.

You can catch the biweekly livestream on Unity’s YouTube channel. Our first session is scheduled for October 13 at 7:00pm CEST (10:00am PT), and you can view it here.

These livestreams are a great opportunity to follow the progress of the project, learn from our accomplishments, and grow as a game developer, no matter your level of expertise or area of interest. We will give space to programmer topics, artist tools and workflows, and more.

We can’t wait to start this journey with you. Check out the repo on Github, come to the forums and talk to us, and tune in to the livestreams starting in October.

We are looking forward to seeing what you will create!