Podcast Interview: The Benefits of Unity for Online and IPhone Game Development

Tom talks about the benefits of Unity for Online and IPhone Game development

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/unity-podcast.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the Game Developers Conference and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Tom: Hi, my name is Tom Higgins. I’m the Product Evangelist for Unity Technologies Game Development Tools Platform. We’ll let you distribute where you want to go.

Interviewer: What exactly is Unity about? Do you have to know a specific language or what?

Tom: No, all you need is our own game development tools. It sits on top of our own engine that’s nice and tightly integrated. You don’t need to learn proprietary scripting language. We use C#, Java Script or Foo, which is a dialect of Python. We support all of the industry standards in terms of file formats, whether you use Photoshop, Mia, Semafor D, the sheet 3D blender, and it’s all about approachability, about ease of use and about bringing the power of the big tool companies to everybody.

So, whether you’re the one person who shops in your home on the Cartoon Network, we want to sell the product to you and let you have access to the tools as the big guys.

Interviewer: How long does it take to develop a gaming community?

Tom: Well, that can depend. We’ve had some folks that have come on board and not knowing the tool at all but being experienced with competitive products that have gone from zero to shipping first product in three months.

Interviewer: OK.

Tom: We’ve had experienced developers who already know the product that have been able to do lite development cycles of six to eight weeks and putting out games that have become popular hits on the Internet, or the iPhone release we only put out last October and there’s already 100 games up, including one from a small individual developer that is currently the number one paid game on the iPhone App Store, the number two paid app overall, and that’s done by a small shop, Mecca Mobile having huge success in the community doing what they want to do.

Interviewer: What’s that game?

Tom: It’s called Zombieville USA. It’s one of my favorite iPhone games for sure. It’s a lot of fun so end of sell message.

Interviewer: Can you talk about iPhone and Unity and how can people use Unity to make iPhone apps?

Tom: Sure. We have a couple of different products. There’s Unity which is our base license. Once you get that, it’s desktop and web, unlimited publishing.

Interviewer: When you say web, what do you mean? Is it something like a flash file or is it…

Tom: Very similar. We have the Unity but it’s one player, one time install, 3 megabyte, no registration dialogues, no browser shutdown, lead user in place. Shockwave.com has games that are [?] so it’s been used across the web. And then, you add on to the base Unity license, and then if you’re interested the Unity iPhone add-on license.

In both cases, we have two tiers of prices. You can get a iPhone development for about $600 with our tool, and with that you are fully enabled to publish as many games as you want. So, we have people as young as teenagers.

There’s one in Sacramento who has six games up. I won’t share his financial figures, but he is making more money already for his games on the App Store and iTunes to being able to post it on the web, to being able to take it to the desktop, and this is a tool for $600 that lets him publish as many games as he wants on up to top level developers. The iPhone bit has been a huge add-on for us because that’s an incredible chance for people to reach lots of people in a really cool way.

Interviewer: Can you talk about development times then for iPhone apps using Unity?

Tom: Sure. It’s not a much different answer than the desktop and web but, of course, once you’re on the iPhone – we like to joke, it’s a phone. It’s not a computer. You have to be more mindful of performance bottlenecks wheher it’s how you use our physics. It’s fully supported but there’s are ways where you can easily bog down performance if you’re not kind of clean and tidy.

Our whole sell message for us about our tool is that we keep the design time short, reduce the pain and make the iteration process smooth and easy. So, iPhone development times again, 100 apps have been released, and we just put the product out in October.

Interviewer: OK.

Tom: And a lot of those folks have been coming on in November, December, January so the idea of a month or two to scratch out a game idea, work on the basic game mechanic, get the game made and submitted to the App Store in a month or two is not unheard of with our product at all.

Interviewer: What’s the benefit of using Unity versus the straight Apple API?

Tom: Well, you know again, it’s because we do the dirty work for you.

Interviewer: The physics engine and stuff like that.

Tom: Yeah, as I said, we’ve got a game engine. We’ve got an editor ready for you to use to develop your content. You’re not building it all from code. It’s using C# and Java Script which are more approachable to some than doing something in Objective-C and then, of course, it’s wrapping it all in one nice package with an art asset plan that we have and a lot of the tools that really let you do more faster than if you were trying to write it from scratch. How many people really want to write their own game engine, let alone write their own 3D engine and all that we already have out of the box.

Interviewer: Now, you talked about doing a MMO in Unity. Is that hard to do? Do you have networking API, or how does that work?

Tom: Is an MMO hard to do? If you want a true MMO, yeah that’s hard to do. It’s massive and it’s complicated. Now, we have a couple weeks to do multi-player. We support HDTD communication. We have built-in multi-player features that are more for the four to six person, small scale.

Interviewer: Sure.

Tom: But, you know, all the features and capability are there so our network has fusioned all that’s out. This is a true MMO, large budget, large team, long development cycle, full scale project being delivered in the browser.

But, again, the same tools that they use, you guys can use at home and because it’s an independent developer all the features that are required there are available on indie products. For $199 you can [?] for desktop and web development and get access to a lot of the same capabilities they are using.

If you want to grow that from a casual multi-player to something that is massively multi-player, well then you level up on the complication factor but it’s all doable eventually.

Interviewer: Now, your other competitors? What separates Unity from other competitors that offer iPhone development, a platform and also 3D all at once?

Tom: This could be a long discussion, so I’ll keep it to the highlights. You know, one is that our editor offering environment. Before you worry about what you are going to distribute, the approachability of our tool, the workflow organization could be put in, the price points we offer, all of that makes the offering process really sleek, optimized and efficient.

Then, you add on to that the fact that we’ve got desktop distribution. You can do a web player distribution. You can take that and do the iPhone distribution. Besides, it’s this easy, slick opportunity for you to target all these environments that nobody else seems to have all of those pieces in place.

We’ve only seen examples of games that have been posted. Downhill Bowling is a game that’s up shockwave.com. I was going to take that and tweak it as necessary for the iPhone and then publish it as an iPhone app or whatever. The competitors had a game on a major portal and then you tweak the game and release it on the iPhone.

Nobody else can touch that whole set and, of course, we never talked about the other hidden thing which is that we also support development. We’re, of course, in other mobile and console platforms. The idea is it’s this one slick efficient tool that lets you target it all, and that’s really the key differentiator and how easy it is we get you into it.

Interviewer: If an indie is interested, how would they get started with using this?

Tom: Well, first and foremost, we’ve got a free 30-day trial offer up on our website. It’s our game day license. We have a game day referral license. If you want to try out the product, if you want to try out the iPhone product, we’ve got those trials available. If you’re our customer, we are happy to provide them.

I feel, what’s the way to get going? Just jump in and do it. Again, our tools are very approachable and intuitive, so we feel that extending that 30 days or we can extend it a little longer, the proof is in the pudding. Once you start experimenting and you realize that it’s your 30 day trial period, you’re only going to learn the tool. You’re not going to figure out how to do stuff and then actually be able to create stuff and start posting it. I think that’s a pretty powerful sell message that we’re never going to get in an advertisement or anything. So, the way to get started is to jump in. It’s a tool that really empowers you from day one.

Interviewer: What’s the URL to it?

Tom: Unity3D.com.

Interviewer: You talked about community. Do you have a development community around Unity that new developers can go to or forums that…

Tom: Yeah, the community is one of our core strengths for sure. The Unity community forums are kind of the central hub for it and a set of forums that we host. All of our employees are there. I’m one of the most active on the forums, our CEO, our CTO, our development team, our QA team, our sales guys. Everything in the company listens in on the forums because that’s the bed of activity and it goes beyond that.

There’s posts that have now spun off. There’s a mailing list. There’s a really active IRC channel. There’s the unified community Wiki. The Unity Developer magazine is a third party. magazine that is now coming out.

The community is definitely a sell factor. It’s there. It’s ready. It’s willing to help out, and you go and post on the forums and you’re going to hear from six people first and then one of us will chime in because there’s that many helpful and interested people out there.

Interviewer: Great. Thank you very much.