Rock, Paper, Shotgun

When Unity 3D went free a friend of mine started playing around with it and voiced the opinion that mods would now increasingly become free or indie games, because here was a 3D engine that was so easy to use, and so straightforward to port assets into. Then we had the UDK announcement, which gave us modder’s favourite, the Unreal Engine, as a free platform. So what does that mean for the future of modding?
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Awesome news for aspiring game designers: The Unity Indie package, formerly $200, is now free, with the pro package remaining at $1500. You’ll remember I chatted with their tech lead last month after playing about with the tech. Here’s the blurb: “Unity Technologies has always believed that the best technology and products should be made available to all developers. We want to accelerate the availability of high quality interactive content,“ said Unity bossman David Helgason. “With the explosive growth in new platforms and performance improvement in our Unity suite of products, we believe that there are no technical hurdles remaining for high quality interactive content everywhere. Now we are removing financial hurdles as well. Unity is mature enough and easy enough to use that it can be the entry point for those developers taking their first steps with the technology.”

And it looks like their servers are getting hammered right now.

A couple of weeks ago I had a chat with Nicholas Francis, one of the founders of Unity 3D, the game development suite. I’d already been looking at Unity because we’d seen a bunch of games using it. The guys over at Blurst use it to make their crazy output, and things like the lovely PuzzleBloom have been turning up on the web more and more. I even downloaded the 30-day trial and messed about editing terrain and adding weird noises to seagulls for a while, at which time Paul Barnett from Mythic dropped me a line to say he was using it to prototype new game projects. I can’t say I spend a great deal of time playing around with development suites, but the accessibility of this one certainly intrigued me. I was glad to be able to put some questions to Francis, and ask a bit more about what his company was up to. They were, it seems, making a nuclear-powered toaster…
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There’s very little to the single level build of Avert Fate, and by the Gods of FPS that mouse acceleration is absurd! Nevertheless the little tech demo shows off the capabilities of the Unity engine rather competently, while at the same time allowing you to shoot a handful of robots. If you’re downloading it then don’t expect too much, it’s simply a two minute taster.