Backwoods Games

Last week I was lucky enough to be invited to attend UbiNight, a gathering of journalists and game industry professionals to test out some of Ubisoft’s latest games.

Starting off the night with a round of multiplayer in Assassins’s Creed: Revelations was fantastic, and the mood of the entire club was very comfortable. Being given the opportunity to play yet to be released games was like being a kid in a candy store. I ran from table to table, testing out some Kinect titles, the new Tin Tin game and the new Rayman: Origins which was particularly beautiful.

A booth for Assassin’s Creed: Revelations had been set up and people were able to get their faces superimposed onto the game cover, which was very cool.

The highlight of the night was getting the chance to play Driver: San Francisco, where I drove down the streets of the area I had stayed in in San Francisco the week before!

UbiNight was fantastic. Free drinks, food and getting to play games before they came out. What more could you ask for? Oh, probably to be an assassin.

-Ethan

Today we started up early as we had a meeting at 9am as we mentioned in our last update. The meeting went very well but we have decided not to disclose any information until a later date, so you will have to keep watching this space for more information soon.

After the meeting we split up to get the most out of the conference. Cam went to a session about best practices for Real-Time characters, which had two speakers talking about an auto rigging tool which would make life so much easier for rapid prototyping in terms of character animations. Ethan attended the post-mortem for popular game Gears which went into detail about the importance of flexible coding, prototyping levels and gameplay development during development.

During the break we began to notice how quiet everyone was. As it turned out, the majority were nursing hangovers from the UNITE11 party last night which had an open bar. Too bad we missed it! Cam then went to see the workflow of a game called Prime World which was very heavily based on Maya and exporting/importing to and from Maya and Unity. Ethan attended a seminar about console development which touched on the various APIs needed to launch for XBLA, PSN and WiiWare. This mainly detailed how developers can secure licensing with Unity for their console of choice.

After these sessions was a short lunch, which was then followed by the Artist Gathering and Unity in the Wild sessions. Cam attended the Artist Gathering and Ethan attended the Unity in the Wild session. Cam socialised and met with other artists who used Unity whilst Ethan saw the various ways Unity had been utilised by developers, with the most inspiring of presentations being given by PixelPlacement’s Bob Berkebile, who showcased his company’s use of augmented reality to create an amazing promotional app in just under 3 weeks for Ford Motors in Canada.

Finally, the last session of UNITE11 rolled around, where we attended the Serious Games session, which showcased use of Unity for things such as Javelin Missile piloting, War Vehicle Maintenance, Clinical/Hospital Routines and Procedures and Runway Landing simulations utilising the Kinect.

After the final session we met up with Greg Dunn, creator of the augmented reality app, BadgerSpot, which we hope to see catching on in Australia soon as it was amazing!  We’re bringing back samples BadgerSpot icons so as to fully demonstrate to people how cool it is.

Overall, this trip has been amazing. We’ve met an amazing array of people from all over the globe and have made a bunch of business contacts in the process which we are sure will only help build our reputation globally. UNITE11 has been an invaluable and unforgettable experience for both of us and we can’t wait to return to San Francisco!

-Ethan and Cam

Cam and Ethan attended yet another day of great presentations at UNITE11, again gaining skills from intense demonstrations of Unity 3.5.

To start the day off Ethan attended the “Road Map and Wish List” where the founders discussed their plans for Unity. Unfortunately, the information disclosed was off the record and not recorded. The audience were told to not disclose these discussions, so for the first time since 9am yesterday the UNITE11 feed on twitter went silent, only to then come back to life with audience members tweeting “we could tell you, but then we would have to kill you” arousing suspicion and interest of Unity users world wide who could not attend the conference.

Unfortunately, Cam did not attend the “top secret” presentation as he ran into the team from Massive Black. He was meant to meet with the president of the company yesterday but the plan fell through. Although this sounds bad, he gained a mentor who has agreed to give back harsh feedback on anything Cam sends to him, to which Cam said “I don’t want people to sugar coat feedback, there is no point getting advice that will not better my work”.

The President of Massive Black also told Cam about another convention which would be worth his while. Although UNITE11 is important for Cam this workshop titled “Workshop SF” is a 4 day intensive workshop with  top creative professionals from the worlds of Entertainment, Film, Games, Comics and Fine Art. The pros then gear up to instruct and inspire students and professionals alike. This will be a matter that Ashleigh Ethan and Cam will talk over as it is a invaluable experience that will better the Backwoods team.

After a short break Cam and Ethan split up to attend seminars that were more specific to their fields, with Ethan attending  the Battle Bears -1 presentation which touched on tweaks, optimizations and cheats to effectively build and deploy for the mobile with Unity. Cam attended the showcase of the new particle tool “Shuriken” which showed off the impressive new upgrades to the current particle system giving the user more ways in which they can specialize their particles to fit the effect for which they are intended. Cam was not 100% happy with the upgrades to the system as they still did not allow the particles to have collision detection, meaning if he were to make a waterfall the particles would not pay attention to the rocks below and fall beneath the level. However, there are ways of getting around this such as the use of the new curve driven technology that has been implemented in the “Shuriken” system. He was also disappointed because the upgrades did not include adding custom meshes to the new particle system as of yet, meaning one could not use the particles for something like a flock of flying birds. Overall however, the “Shuriken” system is a huge step forward in particle systems in for Unity.

All of this was followed by a lengthy one and a half lunch break where Cam and Ethan met the newly founded team members of Techtonic games and Elivs Alistar, a test engineer for Unity.  They then saw the one man game studio Toxic Blob present an inspirational demonstration on just how important Unity is for bridging one of the biggest gaps in the industry, that of the programmer and the artist.

When asked “who has any experience programming”  one man timidly raised his hand and stated “I want to figure out how they think!”, causing the entire audience to laugh. The presentation itself was on Toxic Blob’s game and how easy Unity made programming from an artist’s standpoint. The game by Toxic Blob, titled Sin or Win, will be launched to the iPad later this year.

In the half hour break following the “Artists as Programmers” seminar, Ethan met with Lars and Kristien, two game designers from Denmark who were both proud and excited that their game Branch had been nominated for the UNITE11 Award Ceremony which would take place later in the afternoon. Cam decided to abuse the fact that Massive Black were there and continued to talk about 3D models and animation.

Ethan and Cam split up again with Ethan seeing the post-mortem for Smuggle/Snuggle Truck and how it was created on the whole and Cam seeing an Intro to Shaders in Unity 3.5 with the team from Owlchemy talking about their workflow, build process and platform specific changes. Cam saw once again another showcase of the new found power in Unity 3.5. The presentation was focused on how to give your game the right atmosphere you need and how you can achieve it with Unity’s new shaders and also shaders one can purchase on the Unity Asset Store.

Following the 3:30 block of presentations coming to a close there was a short break where everyone psyched up for the UNITE11 award ceremony. The awards ceremony was broken up into categories; Student, best gameplay, best art, best non game and the gran prix which is the best game overall. The awards were amazing silver trophies of a prefab logo and the “Grand Prix” trophy being solid gold. There were so many games that really went above and beyond what the Unity team had ever imagined.

All in all, UNITE11 Day 2 was a great day for Cam and Ethan and they are both really excited to see what tomorrow holds for them. They already have a 9:00 meeting with a guy who is looking for a game developer and an artist, and that’s just from being on twitter!

Keep watch for more updates.

Cam and Ethan attended the first day of UNITE11 today in San Fran, where they learned a multitude of useful things to further the efficiency of the Backwoods team.

Starting with an introduction from the Unity CEO David Helgason, Nicolas Francis and Joachim Ante. This awesome introduction which showcased new pathfinding techniques using NavMesh, Unity’s AAA initiative, new Assets store add ons like the object browser and new rendering techniques. Unity announced its acquisition of Montreal-based animation technology startup Mecanim, which will now be known as Unity Canada.

This was followed up by the keynote, delivered by none other than David Brevik, the president and COO of  Gazillion Entertainment and lead programmer of and co-creator of Diablo and Diablo II, as well as a multitude of other games. Summing up the best way to design games with “WWND” (What Would Nintendo Do?), Brevik stressed the importance of optimising games to fit their intended platforms and delved into the way Unity allowed it’s users to do this with ease. Brevik also talked about his work at Gazillion and how Unity had been utilised by his team to create Superhero Squad Online, a new browser based MMO.

The initial keynote and introduction ran over time and so the rest of the sessions in the auditorium were pushed back. Next up was a session detailing how MadFinger Games had optimised their new game ShadowGun for mobile devices, showcasing not only the new features of Unity 3.5 such as a new form of lighting that results in no real world lighting being used, as well as new texture and water effects amongst other things.

After this session was a lecture by the famous Schell Games, where the audience was shown how to use scalable development in order to maximise the effectiveness of their game development pipeline in Unity. This delved into using DLLs and an obfuscator in order to build Unity projects in very unique way.

After a short lunch, a lecture on “How to make your art POP” was given in the auditorium. This was given by the president of Bigpoint games and explored how they maximised their return on art production for games such as Battlestar Galactica Online, The Mummy Online and Universal Monsters. Simply put; “Games want their games to look good, load fast and immerse them. They don’t care about your budget or time constraints, they want good looking art!”.

The first day of UNITE11 was definitely useful and inspiring. We learned a hell of a lot of cool stuff and also got a glimpse at Substances in Unity!

Two days left, with tomorrow dealing with Unity’s Road Map and Wish List, Particle Effects, Artists as Programmers, Unity for Educators and a Postmortem of Smuggle Truck (better known as Snuggle Truck now). This is all going to be capped off at 5pm with the Unity Awards and then the main party!

We can’t wait!

-Ethan and Cam

Cam and Ethan have flown the coop this week to attend UNITE 2011 in San Francisco, California!

UNITE is an event for developers, publishers, enthusiasts and others interested in Unity to come together and  learn how to get the most out of Unity, whether it be to for creating high quality video games, training simulations, medical and architectural visualisations or other 3D interactive content.

The pair landed in San Francisco earlier this week and have since spent their time exploring the city and getting themselves some new ink at Black and Blue Tattoo by Rocio. That aside, they’ve met up with some friends in the city and done the general “tourist thing” to kill time before the conference.

Tomorrow is the start of UNITE, which will go for 3 days and will include lectures and master classes from some big names in the industry, including Jesse Schell of Schell Games, a developer the two are very keen to listen to and meet.

Watch this space!