Tag: Unity

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Unity Launch Game Growth Publishing Program

Unity have just launched a new interesting publishing program for indie game developers that have or are creating free to play mobile games. Essentially Unity are offering to fund the promotional costs of selected games and provide monetization, growth and ad placement support over the lifetime of the game. Of course this comes at a cost and that cost is a 50/50 revenue split, with a scenario described on the Unity blog:

We want to be clear about the terms up front so you can decide if Game Growth is the right program for you. Let’s break down the revenue sharing with an example:

1- An indie developer has a mobile game that makes $3,000/month. They apply to the Game Growth program. Unity spends $100,000/month to acquire new users to the game, retains those users with dedicated live operations support, and grows the game to $130,000/month in revenue.*

2- Unity would first recoup their $100,000 in monthly user acquisition costs, leaving $30,000 in monthly revenue. So the developer and Unity would share that $30,000 equally, giving $15,000 to the developer and $15,000 to Unity.*

*This model would continue throughout the partnership. We’re using this fictitious example to illustrate the revenue sharing model only. The exact investment/revenue amounts will not always be consistent month over month.

One major advantage to this approach over a traditional publisher agreement is you retain all control over your company and your games IP with minimal commitment requirements. If you are interested in applying you can do so in the Unity Dashboard.

In addition to the Unity Growth program, there is also an asset giveaway going on right now. You can get the POLYGON Prototype Pack for free using the code ‘SYNTYSALE2020’, available until October 20th. Additionally Synty assets are currently on sale for 50% off. Both of the above links contain an affiliate code that pays GFS a small commission if you buy anything. You can learn more about the new Unity publishing programming and the assets in the video below.

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Unity Launch Open Projects

The Creator and Developer Advocacy group over at Unity have just launched a new initiative called Open Projects, a Unity lead effort to develop a vertical slice of a game that is open source and community driven. If you are looking to get experience at working with a team, or perhaps are a student looking to build up your resume, contributing to an Open Project could be a good fit. The intention is to create open projects for multiple genres, but initially they are starting with an action-adventure style game. The final results will be published (assumedly for free) on Steam, with all contributors credited for their efforts.

There is a bare-bones project in place now you can download from GitHub. In fact GitHub is central to the entire process, as this is where the project will be housed and where all code and asset collaboration will occur. In addition to GitHub they are coordinating the project in a dedicated Open Projects forum, as well there is a Contribution Guide on Google Docs available here. Project management tasks are managed here powered by Codedecks, an online PM tool specifically for game developers.

You can learn more about Unity Open Projects in the video below (or on Odysee here).

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Unity Humble Bundle Improved With 6 New Assets

The ongoing  Unity Game Dev Humble Bundle got even better today with the addition of 6 new assets. Don’t worry if you already purchased the bundle, you will receive all of the added assets up to the tier you purchased.

The new assets added to the pack include:

  • SNAPS Prototype Asian Garden
  • SNAPS Prototype Car Park
  • SNAPS Prototype SciFi Urban
  • SNAPS HD Asian Garden
  • SNAPS HD SciFi Urban
  • SNAPS HD Car Park

The prototype assets are low polygon models ideal for lower end hardware or as the name implies level prototyping. The HD kits on the other hand contain high quality HDRP pipeline assets for use in a commercial grade game. It should be noted that the HD packs are not currently updated to the most current HDRP and some breakage may occur. Unity have stated they intend to update the assets to the most current Unity version soon. You can learn more about the additions and see the SciFi Urban HD asset in action in the video below.

In addition to the new assets, we have already covered several of the assets included in this bundling including UModeler, Clayxels and the highly recommended Peek.

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Hands-On With Peek For Unity

In the next part in our going look at key extensions in the Unity Game Dev Humble Bundle, today we are looking at Peek from Ludiq. In previous features we have looked at UModeler and Clayxels if you are interested in learning more.

Peek is a powerful add-on the greatly changes the way you work with Unity, including features like:

  • Dynamic toolbars the replace the requirement for the Inspector windows
  • Pop up support on Ctrl+F replacing the need for the Hierarchy window
  • Sticky drag and drop
  • Quick reference inspection
  • Creator to quickly create and place objects and instances in your scene
  • Multi-object grouping

You can see Peek and most of these features in action in the video below (or here on Odysee). Peek is regularly $60 on the Unity Asset Store and is half that price (with dozens of other assets and games) in the current Bundle, expiring in 9 days.

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Brackeys Calls It Quits And GameFromScratch Is Now On Odysee

We have two news stories in one today, the first a bit of sad news for Unity developers. Popular YouTube Unity tutorial creator Brackey has called it quits after 8+ years of making tutorials. Thankfully he is leaving under happy circumstances, it’s basically the digital equivalent of retirement. So to Brackeys, congratulations and best of luck to you in your future endeavours, I am sure you have helped a legion of developers learn Unity. The channel will remain up, as will the community Discord server, only the Patreon page is being removed… and of course no new content will be posted.

In completely unrelated news, GameFromScratch video content is now available on Odysee. This is not actually all that new, as Odysee is ultimately a new front end for Lbry.tv. Lbry.tv and now Odysee are the only other place beside YouTube where GFS video content is officially available. Shortly after the YouTube Extortion strike experience it became incredibly clear to me that having all of my eggs in one virtual basket was a very bad idea. Unfortunately the Lbry end user experience was never all that great. With the recent improvements and the launch of Odysee, it has become a much better alternative to YouTube, so be sure to check it out if you are looking for a YouTube alternative. There are already several game development channels on there, including GDQuest.

Learn more in the video below, or once it’s mirrored, you can watch it on Odysee too! 😉

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Unity 2020.2 Beta Released

Unity 2020.2 beta is here and given the released number of releases that Unity are going to do annually, that makes this a more significant release than in the past. This beta release includes several system level and quality of life improvements including:

  • Support for C# 8
  • Dark Mode IDE support (this was actually added to previous versions as well)
  • C# compiler and IL2CPP compiler improvements
  • EIP, or Editor Iteration Profiler, to help identify bottlenecks during domain reloads
  • Unity Safe Mode for troubleshooting script errors on startup
  • Profiler improvements
  • New localization and UI design packages
  • URP and HDRP pipelines both improved
  • VFX Graph output events (lights, sounds, physics and custom C# code call-outs)
  • Shader Graph
  • New UI designer tools
  • 2D tools streamlined, repackaged and improved
  • Support for Apple ARM on desktop architecture
  • Much, much more.

Be sure to check out the complete release notes for more details on the changes in Unity 2020.2. You can also learn more about the release in the video below, including a small rant about one of the biggest problems facing Unity these days… fragmentation and stability.

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Clayxels — Bringing Clay Modelling and Claymation to Unity

Currently featured in the Unity Game Dev Humble Bundle as well as being 50% off on the Unity Asset Store, Clayxel is an asset that extends Unity to add support for modelling then animating clay-like 3D objects.

Clayxels is described on the Store page as:

Clayxels is an interactive volumetric toolkit to sculpt models in editor and in game. It uses voxels to generate a lightweight point-cloud that can be changed in real-time and used in a whole bunch of different ways, all without any heavy pixel ray-marching. Works both in editor and in game, everything made with clayxels can be changed interactively at any time.

Works with all render pipelines, built-in, URP, HDRP.

It is important to note that Clayxel currently *does not* support the WebGL targets. In the video below we go hands-on with Clayxel, give you an overview of it’s capabilities and show you a simple tutorial on how to get up and running creation clay objects in your Unity game. The Unity Humble Bundle runs until the end of September, so don’t miss out if Clayxel looks interesting to you. Another asset in the bundle, UModeler, was covered in an earlier GFS post. The above links contain an affiliate code that pays a small commission to GameFromScratch if used to purchase (and thanks so much if you do!).