Unity

I’m still at Unite 2014 this week, so I thought I’d deliver a quick recap of the Unite 2014 keynote, courtesy of Jaime Rodriguez, of Microsoft. Here was my favorite talk of Unite as well: [Unite 2014 – IL2CPP: The next generation of scripting in Unity](Unite%202014 - IL2CPP: The next generation of scripting in Unity) Unite 2014 – WebGL Deployment in Unity 5 Opening stats: [David Helgason, CEO] 600k active montly game developers .. [compared to 120k users, 3 years ago] 54% of games use middleware [compared to 10% 4 years ago] 47% mobile developers use Unity [17% in 2009] 8.7B Unity mobile app installs [not all inclusive, that is people who opt-in to analytics] PC has strength [mobile devs targeting PCs as they get better] Industry: [David Helgason, CEO] ...

RESOURCES: You can find the source for this project on my GitHub. In part 1 of my tutorial, I showed you how you how to set up the initial project with prime[31]. Now that we have it built, I’m going to walk you through the code, as well as how it all works. Now that we have the project built, let’s open it up the metro folder, and launch the Prime31 Visual Studio solution. ...

My co-worker, and web dev ninja, Stacey Mulcahy (@bitchwhocodes) put together a great series of blog posts on how to use Spacebrew ( a web sockets solution built on Node that enables you to create interactive spaces with several clients ) with Unity3d and Arduino & Processing. This is the beginning / start of next week’s bit where she shows how to build your own DDR mat and hook it into Unity3d, Arduino, and Processing. ...

I recently put together a new meetup for Unity game developers in Philadelphia. This will likely be held at City CoHo Philly Nexus, 2401 Walnut St., Suite 102, Philadelphia, PA (map), and on Monday evenings. The location is ideal, as Drexel University and UPenn are right down the block, and public transit is close by. You can either get off at Suburban Station (Comcast Center) or 30th Street (Amtrak) and Coho is right between the two. ...

Today, Unity and Microsoft announced a new world-wide contest with $100K in prizes to bring Unity games to Windows and Windows Phone. The rules are pretty straight forward, and he contest site is hosted at http://unity3d.com/contest/windows, so feel free to head over and submit your games!

I’ve been a huge fan of shmups for as long as I can remember. If it’s good, I’ve played it (and it’s probably Japanese). I wrote my last one in JavaScript using the Impact.js framework, but this time around I wanted to do it in Unity and really test the performance of the engine. When looking for Unity shmup templates, I came across this great set of posts on the Shmup-dev website. One post includes an excellent talk on unity shmup development, with slides and source code to go along with it. It really touches on some of the basics and key points for creating a shmup, including performance considerations. Object pooling is absolutely necessary when creating a high performance game, and the author monoRAIL explains it very neatly for readers. ...

Update 3/29/16 With today’s announcements at //BUILD, some of this information will be out of date. I will make changes in the very near future. Updated, 9/24/15 TLDR: Middleware engines work great and support for Xbox one is continuing to grow within new tools each day. I have a more recent post with more information following Microsoft’s presence at GDC 2015. Here is the latest. For developers to focus on building for the UWP. Building UWP apps today is the best way to make sure apps will work on the Xbox when UWP is available on the Xbox. Similarly how different device families have specific APIs (GPIO, Hardware buttons, etc), Xbox will have a set of APIs that developer can use to extend experience to match the Xbox One, and those APIs will be used on top of the core UWP functionality that developers are building today. ...