Think of the day you won’t need to install software on your computer to play any game. It may be closer than we expect as Artificial Intelligence (AI) gaming engines and advanced graphics are coming to our web browsers.
Beginning the next year we will be able to play more advanced games straight on the web. Developers will have the opportunity to export their content directly to the web and it will be playable without interacting with any browser plugins thanks to the upgrades of the game developing platforms.
Moreover, with smartphones and tablets becoming the de facto mobile gaming consoles, devs focus must switch to a multi-platform approach.
Mathieu Muller, Field Engineer for Unity Technologies, which develops the most popular licensed 3D game engine, delivered at this year’s How to Web Conference Game development track a presentation on how the Unity 5 platform is addressing this changes.
Software engineer with more than seven years experience in the gaming industry, Mathieu has previously worked for Autodesk, where he was in charge with product design, support and training on Gameware Navigation tools. Before that, at Kynogon (now Autodesk Kynapse), he was responsible with development, support and integration on different platforms (PC, Linux, Consoles, Unreal).
Mathieu’s background also includes five years of experience in the simulation industry, having worked for the Thales Group on graphics engine and Artificial Intelligence.
How to Web: Game of Thrones: The Seven Kingdoms is one of most anticipated MMORPG’s of the year. The developer Bigpoint chose Unity engine for it. How far have web based engines come in dealing with complex graphics and multiplayer requirements?
Mathieu Muller: Unity has been working for quite a long time hand to hand with browser manufacturers to propose solutions to run the best graphics and interactive experiences online. This is one of the reason why companies like Big Point, or Artplant, the studio who developed the browser game Battlestar Galactica online, trusted Unity for this and chose it again for Games Of Thrones: The Seven Kingdoms.
These days we are again closely collaborating with Mozilla and other browser manufacturers engineers to bring WebGL aka plugin-free-high-performance-browser-applications development to our users.
The key of the success is also to work closely with our users to validate the technology before the release. Last month, “Aaaaa!” – the first WebGl Unity 5 game was released by Owlchemy Labs.
Unity is not only a web based engine, but a truly cross-platform game creation system, engine and IDE. Which one of the 17 platforms you cover has the quickest adoption of Unity?
Across the world, based on the number and variety of target devices, the mobile platforms have the quickest adoption. In total we had more than 8 billion mobile applications installed running with Unity, compared to 300 millions on desktop.
With the ease to port, most mobile applications are developed from the start for Android and iOS and more and more on Windows phone. One interesting number is that Unity web player is the next most used platform just after mobile platforms themselves.
How did Unity managed to became the favorite platform for independent game developers?
The three main reasons why indie game developers choose Unity, on top of Unity being a good game engine, are: multi-platform, ease of use and learn, and the asset store. This is the result of many good decisions, great execution and a bit of luck.
Good decisions and great execution were driven by the initial and still true vision of democratising game development. This is what brought the free edition which helped building a very strong and reach community along with good learning materials, live trainings, tutorials, and forums.
This vision also brought into the boat the best people from the game industry or any talented people who wanted to accomplish this dream of building the best and easiest tools. People are talented and very dedicated, and this is where great execution comes from, especially paired with investment on a strong QA team and tools.
Luck brought iOS at the right moment, when Unity was a Mac only editor and game engine. This is what made Unity jump into multi-platform.
Today we are adding many services which start becoming the fourth pillar of adoption. Unity ads, Everyplay to allow players to share replays, Cloud build to let the cloud build on different platforms while you stay developing on your preferred one, and other upcoming services. These services as the asset store are helping users to focus on what they are gifted for, and users definitely like it.
Briefly name the most important new features that your newest product generation – Unity 5 will brings to the game devs.
Unity 5 is packed with new features, with big ones like physical based shader, new static and dynamic global illumination , WebGl, multi-threaded physics using Nvidia PhysX 3.3, 64bits Editor, multitrack audio mixer and sound effects, Speedtree native integration,… But there are also many not so shiny features which solve a lot of day to day problems to our users like scene merging, asset bundle packaging, timeline multithread profiling, or new nodes for Mecanim.
Do you think that smartphone and tablets as gaming devices will take a significant piece of the console market besides of building one of their own? Why (not)?
Smartphone and tablets cover the biggest range and variety of games and applications, from very simple casual to almost AAA graphics games on high end devices. They also touch the widest range of gamers, from kids to grand-parents, including hard-core gamers.
More than taking pieces, there is clearly a convergence going on between consoles and mobile gaming, with indie and free to play arriving on console, and console titles coming on mobile, like Assassin’s Creed Identity for iOS.
With Unity, the target platform is not a major issue. If a game is great and should meet a large audience on another platform there are very few reasons to not target it.
Please give our game developers community some short tips on how to start a good cross-platform mobile game, what to begin with.
The main tip is to think multi-platform from day one. Multi-platform means different builds, different performances on different hardwares, and different devices resolutions and aspect ratios.
From the design part, think multiple aspect ratios and multiple resolutions. If you start a project, jump on the 4.6 Beta for the new UI system designed for multiple aspect ratios.
The cloud build, which is currently in Beta, is a best tool to monitor and test builds, because it will build for you on different platforms and guarantee that at each commit your application is compiling on these platforms. Moreover it will be easy for people to test on mobile because a link is sent by mail or available on a web interface for each valid build to test the application directly on device.
Also keep an eye regularly on performances with the profiler and statistics. Don’t think that bad performances can be solved the days before shipping.