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Unity Technologies Corporation is an Economically Disadvantaged and Woman Owned Small Business (EDWOSB / WOSB) providing professional and technical services to government agencies. We specialize in: Industrial & Enterprise Systems Modernization FIAR - Financial Improvement and Audit Readiness Industrial Facility Transformation Program and Project Management Enterprise Support and Consulting Advanced Analytics

Unity Technologies

unity-technologies

Unity Technologies is laying off 265 people — 3.8% of its 7,000 employees — as it undergoes a “company reset,” according to Reuters. All 256 laid off workers were part of Unity’s Wētā Digital division; several Wētā FX tools and 275 employees were acquired by Unity in 2021 in a ...

Unity caps a turbulent year with layoffs, termination of its Peter Jackson deal

Unity Technologies, the troubled video game software company responsible for one of the most widely used game creation tools in the industry, will cut 265 jobs as part of its efforts to reduce the number of services the company offers. The layoffs were reported by Reuters Tuesday evening.

Unity Cuts Nearly 4% of Staff a Month After CEO’s Departure - The Messenger

223 Stories To Learn About Game Development

Unity DOTS allows developers to use the full potential of modern processors and deliver highly optimized, efficient games – and we think it’s worth paying attention to. It’s been over five years since Unity first announced development of their Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS). Now, with the release of Unity 2023.3.0f1, we’ve finally seen an official release. But why is Unity DOTS so critical to the game development industry, and what advantages does this technology offer? Hello, everyone! My name is Denis Kondratev, and I'm a Developer at MY.GAMES. If you've been eager to understand what Unity DOTS is and whether it's worth exploring, this is the perfect opportunity to delve into this fascinating topic, and in this article – we’ll do just that. Unity What is the Entity Component System (ECS)? At its core, DOTS implements the Entity Component System (ECS) architectural pattern. To simplify this concept, let’s describe it like this: ECS is built upon three fundamental elements: Entities, Components, and Systems. , on their own, lack any inherent functionality or description. Instead, they serve as containers for various Components, which bestow them with specific characteristics for game logic, object rendering, sound effects, and more. Entities , in turn, come in different types and just store data without independent processing capabilities of their own. Components Completing the ECS framework are , which process Components, handle Entity creation and destruction, and manage the addition or removal of Components. Systems For instance, when creating a "Space Shooter" game, the playground will feature multiple objects: the player's spaceship, enemies, asteroids, loot, you name it. All of these objects are considered entities in their own right, devoid of any distinct features. However, by assigning different components to them, we can imbue them with unique attributes. To demonstrate, considering that all these objects possess positions on the game field, we can create a position component that holds the object's coordinates. Furthermore, for the player's spaceship, enemies, and asteroids, we can incorporate health components; the system responsible for handling object collisions will govern the health of these entities. Additionally, we can attach an enemy type component to the enemies, enabling the enemy control system to govern their behavior based on their assigned type. While this explanation provides a simplistic, rudimentary overview, the reality is somewhat more complex. Nonetheless, I trust that the fundamental concept of ECS is clear. With that out of the way, let's delve into the advantages of this approach. The benefits of the Entity Component System One of the main advantages of the Entity Component System (ECS) approach is the architectural design it promotes. (OOP) carries a significant legacy with patterns like inheritance and encapsulation, and even experienced programmers can make architectural mistakes in the heat of development, leading to refactoring or tangled logic in long-term projects. Object-oriented programming In contrast, ECS provides a simple and intuitive architecture. Everything falls naturally into isolated components and systems, making it easier to understand and develop using this approach; even novice developers quickly grasp this approach with minimal errors. ECS follows a composite approach, where isolated components and behavior systems are created instead of complex inheritance hierarchies. These components and systems can be easily added or removed, allowing for flexible changes to entity characteristics and behavior – this approach greatly enhances code reusability. Another key advantage of ECS is performance optimization. In ECS, data is stored in memory in a contiguous and optimized manner, with identical data types placed close to each other. This optimizes data access, reduces cache misses, and improves memory access patterns. Moreover, systems composed of separate data blocks are easier to parallelize across different processes, leading to exceptional performance gains compared to traditional approaches. Exploring the packages of Unity DOTS Unity DOTS encompasses a set of technologies provided by Unity Technologies that implement the ECS concept in Unity. It includes several packages designed to enhance different aspects of game development; let’s cover a few of those now. The core of DOTS is the package, which facilitates the transition from familiar MonoBehaviours and GameObjects to the Entity Component System approach. This package forms the foundation of DOTS-based development. Entities The package introduces a new approach to handling physics in games, achieving remarkable speed through parallelized computations. Unity Physics Additionally, the package allows integration with the modern Havok Physics engine. This engine offers high-performance collision detection and physical simulation, powering popular games such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Doom Eternal, Death Stranding, Mortal Kombat 11, and more. Havok Physics for Unity The package focuses on rendering in DOTS. It enables efficient gathering of rendering data and works seamlessly with existing render pipelines like the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) or High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP). Entities Graphics One more thing, Unity has also been actively developing a networking technology called Netcode. It includes packages like Unity Transport for low-level multiplayer game development, Netcode for GameObjects for traditional approaches, and the noteworthy package, which aligns with DOTS principles. These packages are relatively new and will continue to evolve in the future. Unity Netcode for Entities Enhancing performance in Unity DOTS and beyond Several technologies closely related to DOTS can be used within the DOTS framework and beyond. The package provides a convenient way to write code with parallel computations. It revolves around dividing work into small chunks called jobs, which perform computations on their own data. The Job System evenly distributes these jobs across threads for efficient execution. Job System To ensure code safety, the Job System supports the processing of blittable data types. Blittable data types have the same representation in managed and unmanaged memory and require no conversion when passed between managed and unmanaged code. Examples of blittable types include byte, sbyte, short, ushort, int, uint, long, ulong, float, double, IntPtr, and UIntPtr. One-dimensional arrays of blittable primitive types and structures containing exclusively blittable types are also considered blittable. However, types containing a variable array of blittable types are not considered blittable themselves. To address this limitation, Unity has developed the package, which provides a set of unmanaged data structures for use in jobs. These collections are structured and store data in unmanaged memory using Unity mechanisms. It is the developer's responsibility to deallocate these collections using the Disposal() method. Collections Another important package is the , which can be used with the Job System to generate highly optimized code. Although it comes with certain code usage limitations, the Burst compiler provides a significant performance boost. Burst Compiler Measuring performance with Job System and Burst Compile As mentioned, Job System and Burst Compiler are not direct components of DOTS but provide valuable assistance in programming efficient and fast parallel computations. Let's test their capabilities using a practical example: implementing . In this algorithm, a field is divided into cells, each of which can be either alive or dead. During each turn, we check the number of live neighbors for each cell, and their states are updated according to specific rules. Conway's Game of Life algorithm Here’s the implementation of this algorithm using the traditional approach: private void SimulateStep()
{
    Profiler.BeginSample(nameof(SimulateStep));
    
    for (var i = 0; i < width; i++)
    {
        for (var j = 0; j < height; j++)
        {
            var aliveNeighbours = CountAliveNeighbours(i, j);
            var index = i * height + j;

             var isAlive = aliveNeighbours switch
            {
                2 => _cellStates[index],
                3 => true,
                _ => false
            };

             _tempResults[index] = isAlive;
        }
    }
    
    _tempResults.CopyTo(_cellStates);
    Profiler.EndSample();
}

private int CountAliveNeighbours(int x, int y)
{
    var count = 0;
    
    for (var i = x - 1; i <= x + 1; i++)
    {
        if (i < 0 || i >= width) continue;
        
        for (var j = y - 1; j <= y + 1; j++)
        {
            if (j < 0 || j >= height) continue;

            if (_cellStates[i * width + j])
            {
                count++;
            }
        }
    }

    return count;
} I’ve added markers to Profiler to measure the time taken for the calculations. The states of the cells are stored in a one-dimensional array called . We initially write the temporary results to and then copy them back to upon completing the calculations. This approach is necessary because writing the final result directly to would affect subsequent calculations. _cellStates _tempResults _cellStates _cellStates I created a field of 1000x1000 cells and ran the program to measure the performance. Here are the results: As seen from the results, the calculations took 380 ms. Now let's apply the Job System and Burst Compiler to improve the performance. First, we will create the Job responsible for executing the Conway's Game of Life algorithm. public struct SimulationJob : IJobParallelFor
{
    public int Width;
    public int Height;
    [ReadOnly] public NativeArray<bool> CellStates;
    [WriteOnly] public NativeArray<bool> TempResults;

    public void Execute(int index)
    {
        var i = index / Height;
        var j = index % Height;
        var aliveNeighbours = CountAliveNeighbours(i, j);

        var isAlive = aliveNeighbours switch
        {
            2 => CellStates[index],
            3 => true,
            _ => false
        };

        TempResults[index] = isAlive;
    }
    
    private int CountAliveNeighbours(int x, int y)
    {
        var count = 0;
    
        for (var i = x - 1; i <= x + 1; i++)
        {
            if (i < 0 || i >= Width) continue;
        
            for (var j = y - 1; j <= y + 1; j++)
            {
                if (j < 0 || j >= Height) continue;

                if (CellStates[i * Width + j])
                {
                    count++;
                }
            }
        }

        return count;
    }
} I have assigned the attribute to the field, allowing unrestricted access to all values of the array from any thread. However, for the field, which has the attribute, writing can only be done through the index specified in the method. Attempting to write a value to a different index will generate a warning. This ensures data safety when working in a multi-threaded mode. [ReadOnly] CellStates TempResults [WriteOnly] Execute(int index) Now, from the regular code, let's launch our Job: private void SimulateStepWithJob()
{
    Profiler.BeginSample(nameof(SimulateStepWithJob));

    var job = new SimulationJob
    {
        Width = width,
        Height = height,
        CellStates = _cellStates,
        TempResults = _tempResults
    };

    var jobHandler = job.Schedule(width * height, 4);
    jobHandler.Complete();
    job.TempResults.CopyTo(_cellStates);
    Profiler.EndSample();
} After copying all the necessary data, we schedule the execution of the job using the method. It's important to note that this scheduling doesn't immediately execute the calculations: these actions are initiated from the main thread, and the execution happens through workers distributed among different threads. To wait for the job to complete, we use . Only then can we copy the obtained result back to . Schedule() jobHandler.Complete() _cellStates Let's measure the speed: The execution speed has increased almost tenfold, and the execution time is now approximately 42 ms. In the Profiler window, we can see that the workload was distributed among 17 workers. This number is slightly less than the number of processor threads in the test environment, which is an Intel® Core™ i9-10900 with 10 cores and 20 threads. While the results may vary on processors with fewer cores, we can ensure the full utilization of the processor's power. But that's not all – it's time to utilize Burst Compiler, which provides significant code optimization but comes with certain restrictions. To enable Burst Compiler, simply add the attribute to the . [BurstCompile] SimulationJob [BurstCompile]
public struct SimulationJob : IJobParallelFor
{
    ...
} Let's measure again: The results exceed even the most optimistic expectations: speed has increased almost 200 times compared to the initial result. Now, the computation time for 1 million cells is no more than 2 ms. In Profiler, the parts executed by the code compiled with the Burst Compiler are highlighted in green. Conclusion While the use of multithreaded computations may not always be necessary, and the utilization of Burst Compiler may not always be possible, we can observe a common trend in processor development toward multi-core architectures. This means that we should be prepared to harness their full power. ECS, and specifically Unity DOTS, align perfectly with this paradigm. I believe that Unity DOTS deserves attention, at the very least. While it may not be the best solution for every case, ECS can prove its worth in many games. The Unity DOTS framework, with its data-oriented and multithreaded approach, offers tremendous potential for optimizing performance in Unity games. By adopting the Entity Component System architecture and leveraging technologies like the Job System and Burst Compiler, developers can unlock new levels of performance and scalability. As game development continues to evolve and hardware advances, embracing Unity DOTS becomes increasingly valuable. It empowers developers to harness the full potential of modern processors and deliver highly optimized and efficient games. While Unity DOTS may not be the ideal solution for every project, it undoubtedly holds immense promise for those seeking performance-driven development and scalability. Unity DOTS is a powerful framework that can significantly benefit game developers by enhancing performance, enabling parallel computations, and embracing the future of multi-core processing. It’s worth exploring and considering its adoption to fully leverage modern hardware and optimize the performance of Unity games.

Exploring Unity DOTS and ECS: Is it a Game Changer?

ইউনিটি ডটস এবং ইসিএস অন্বেষণ: এটি কি একটি গেম চেঞ্জার?

Erkundung von Unity DOTS und ECS: Ist es ein Game Changer?

Explorando Unity DOTS y ECS: ¿es un cambio de juego?

Exploration de Unity DOTS et ECS : cela change-t-il la donne ?

यूनिटी डॉट्स और ईसीएस की खोज: क्या यह गेम चेंजर है?

Unity DOTS と ECS の探求: それはゲームチェンジャーですか?

Unity DOTS 및 ECS 살펴보기: 게임 체인저인가요?

Explorando Unity DOTS e ECS: é uma virada de jogo?

Unity DOTS ve ECS'yi Keşfetmek: Oyun Değiştirici mi?

Khám phá Unity DOTS và ECS: Nó có phải là yếu tố thay đổi cuộc chơi không?

探索 Unity DOTS 和 ECS：它会改变游戏规则吗？

Here's a walk down memory lane of the technology platforms I used to develop educational games and simulations since I started my ed-tech company in 1994. Asymetrix Multimedia Toolbook I started with Multimedia Toolbook by Asymetrix. It was a really good and well-refined program, The company was founded by Paul Allen, co-founder of . But it was for Windows only and Apple Macs were becoming too popular in schools to ignore so most developers jumped to Macromedia Director. Microsoft Macromedia Director Director by Macromedia was also a great program, but not as well refined as Toolbook. I pushed the envelope with Director creating my first super-realistic business simulation. It won an award at a Macromedia developer conference. I created all sorts of apps with it, including one that communicated with satellite data systems to identify the location of locomotives. Adobe Director Director was eventually acquired by . My team and I continued to use Director for many years but, to the disappointment of many, Adobe did not continue to develop the program well and their customer support was terrible. I presume they kept it alive as a cash cow to fund other projects, but I'm just speculating. All I know is that the change of ownership was not good. Adobe Adobe Flash Adobe also acquired Flash from another company. Adobe did invest in developing Flash further and it became a capable platform used widely around the world. We developed several educational games and simulations with Flash. And lots of other people developed annoying websites that forced you to sit and watch Flash animations before entering the site :-) Steve Jobs of Apple single-handedly killed Flash by banning it from Apple devices. This forced developers like us to incur very high costs to rebuild our products using other platforms. On a positive note, it did clean up those Flash websites :-) Unity Unity by Unity Technologies is a widely-used game development platform. It is much more complex than the platforms noted above. It is also more capable and modern (in most ways but not all). But there was a period of time when Unity apps would not run at all online — they had to be installed on your computer. This was a serious limitation as much of the world was moving to software as a service. But web technologies were not mature enough to support Unity. We did create a few apps with Unity and those apps are still good today. Unity continues to be a popular platform that most game developers should consider. HTML 5 is the internet standard that made it possible to create more feature-rich apps that play online. It took many years for the Internet (world wide web) to mature enough for this standard to be possible. HTML 5 Once all the major Internet browsers supported it, developers like us were able to build educational games and simulations without being bound to a specific software platform owned and controlled by a third party. And our users did not have to install any software as everything became playable online (software as a service). What's Next? Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed reality (MR), Web 3 — here is a I created some time ago. helpful chart of these technologies Also published here.

30 Years of Tech Tools in EdTech Development

What is Web3 Gaming? , the founder of , web3 gaming is a form of decentralised gaming in which control over game assets and platform-wide decisions are dispersed among players rather than a centralised entity. As per Akash, as a result of incorporating blockchain technology into the gaming environment, web3 games give players a voice in determining the pace and direction of future game development. By introducing asset trading, tradable game tokens, and chances to earn in virtual currencies while playing, web3 gaming provides the groundwork for play-to-earn for gamers. As per Akash Takyar LeewayHertz , the widespread interoperability between different gaming ecosystems is a major benefit of web3 gaming, which connects in-game materials and players between platforms. The choice of a blockchain platform for building a gaming environment affects the degree to which different components may communicate with one another. For illustration, Polkadot and both provide cross-chain communication bridges with interoperability features. As per Akash The World of Web3 is Transforming the Gaming Industry , in the first three months of 2022, blockchain games raised a total of $2.5 billion and grew by 2,000% compared to the previous year. In future, due to web3 games building exciting gameFi products, gamers may no longer need to rely on a handful of monopolistic platform owners and game administrators to enjoy their favourite games. According to DappRadar This convergence of blockchain and metaverse technologies may usher in the dawn of web3 gaming, bringing in a period of profound change for the gaming industry as web3 gaming may improve the gaming industry's bottom line by introducing cutting-edge technologies and concepts like blockchain, DAO, and the play-to-earn to the masses. Bringing the GameFi Industry Together with the Grammys of Gaming: GAM3 Awards The , the first of its kind, is a between many major players in the web3 gaming business and seeks to emulate the Grammys of the industry. On the 15th of December, Polkastarter Gaming will present an awards ceremony to honour the greatest web3 games of the year, as determined by a panel of industry professionals and the general public. GAM3 Awards collaborative effort The GAM3 Awards were created to promote top-tier web3 games and to demonstrate blockchain's positive impact on the gaming industry. The award show will stream live on Polkastarter Gaming's Twitch, YouTube, and Twitter channels. A jury of over 30 gaming and web3 industry experts, ecosystem partners, and media sources will be present to vote on the finalists and winners. : Vested Interest Disclosure The author is an independent contributor publishing via our . Be it through direct compensation, media partnerships, or networking. The author has a vested interest in the company/ies mentioned in this story. HackerNoon has reviewed the report for quality, but the claims herein belong to the author. #DYOR brand-as-author program Sixteen prizes, including "Game of the Year," are up for grabs and are being shared among over 200 web3 games and content developers. Itai Elizur, Managing Partner at Market Across; Justin Kan, Founder of Fractal; Urvit Goel, Head of Global Games at Polygon Studios; Rachel Levin, Director of Venture & Strategy at ImmutableX; and Matt Sorg, Head of Technology at the Solana Foundation, are among the judges who will decide which studios win awards. who directed Sonic: Unleashed and Final Fantasy XIV Online (Yoshihisa Hashimoto) and former Senior Director of Partnerships at Electronic Arts comprise are part of the all-star jury with decades of gaming experience. In addition, the jury includes former senior executives from Electronic Arts, Riot Games, Zynga, Xbox Game Studios, Amazon Gaming, and Unity Technologies. Former Square Enix CTO Bringing Web3 to the Masses with Web3 Gaming The GAM3 Awards will emphasise the high quality of web3 games and demonstrate the full potential of integrating blockchain technology without compromising the games’ caliber. According to Polkastarter Gaming, the team wanted to remind everyone this is about actual “games”, not earning nor tokenomics, so the team dropped the web3 buzzwords and kept the 3 as part of the name. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yd_20n-pmt8?embedable=true The games will be evaluated on several fronts, such as their central gameplay, visuals, accessibility, replay value, entertaining components, and overall play experience. Games that include and exploit blockchain technology without sacrificing gameplay or playability are encouraged to submit entries. The event also aims to honour the next generation of web3 gaming creators by encouraging game studios to nominate and honour their employees, developers, and professionals across specialisations who best exemplify the next generation of web3 gaming by being included in the inaugural 'GAM3 Changers' list. As the industry evolves, these awards have the potential to become the standard yearly celebrations thanks to the scope of the event and overall initiative, which is seen in the widely recognised jury and partners. What are the GAM3 Awards? The first iteration of the annual web3 gaming awards is called GAM3 Awards 2022. Hosted by Polkastarter Gaming, which has amassed a community of over 70,000 players worldwide, this event is Polkastarter's first attempt to reimagine the future of blockchain gaming. Top game developers and content producers are honoured with cash and services worth more than $300,000 at an annual event that attracts industry leaders, ecosystems, and media outlets to celebrate the year's best web3 games. Don’t forget to like and share the story! and . Image credits: , , Mika Matin Shubham's Web3 GuerrillaBuzz Blockchain PR Agency Reference: LeewayHertz.

Legends of Blockchain Gaming Come Together for the 1st Annual GAM3 Awards

Hyper-casual is a genre of games that can be developed fairly quickly. Not surprisingly, more and more developers are choosing this direction. I've been in game development for more than 10 years. For the last 8 months, I’ve worked at hyper-casual publisher, , collaborating with beginning and experienced hyper-casual development teams. Ducky One of the most frequent questions beginning hyper-casual developers face is how to make a game's scene look good and spend less time on its design. The answer to this question consists of many points of design and development, such as color palette selection, object creation, shaping, shaders, and other visual parameters. In this article, I’ll focus on setting up and share how to make the game scene developed in more pleasing to the eye. shaders Unity What Are Shaders in Unity and Why Are They Important Shaders in Unity are programs that run on a GPU (graphics processing unit). Shaders calculate the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene. This process is known as shading. The shaders in Unity create engaging graphics from an incomplete scene. The range of achievable effects is huge — from basic lightning shades added to an X-ray view or cartoony outlines. Properly adjusted shaders allow beautiful, clean colors, stylish cartoon looks in games, and various effects added to the rendering output. In hyper-casual games, shaders are widely used to make a prototype or a full game scene look good. Knowing the basic rules for using and configuring shaders will help make the prototyping process faster, which is invaluable in fast-paced hyper-casual development and testing cycles. Basic Rules for Setting up Shadows for a Hyper-casual Scene Let me take you through this guide with the example scene of a simple hyper-casual game. Let’s say that the designers have already chosen four colors for one of the scenes of this future game: At first, the scene might seem gray and dirty. This is the point where the team starts working with shaders to eliminate this perception following these basic rules: Black shadows make the scene quite gloomy and draw too much attention. The emphasis in the scene should be on the characters (the main character, allies, enemies), obstacles, and coins, but not on a deeply black object shadow. 1. Avoid black shadows. Just picture a scene in a game with a light background and hundreds of characters and each of them cast a black shadow. It's definitely not pleasing to the player's eye. For a hyper-casual game, it's better to use cartoon-looking shaders. As a rule, every object in the scene has a light side and a shadow side. And both sides have one color in all places and no halftones. But the scene doesn't look like this before shaders are adjusted. In the example above, I have shown a typical scene before setting up shaders. 2. Keep a limitation in mind. As you can see, the left shadow side of each object is black and the right side is light, which creates a strong contrast between the colors. This effect hurts the eye and the designer must smooth it out. In addition, both sides contain one color in all places and no halftones. . Such shaders are obtained by using black and grey colors. It’s better to replace black and grey shadows with colored ones — green, purple or blue. 3. Avoid shadows that are too dark or dirty What's good for beginners is that there is an option to get and adjust ready-made shaders, instead of developing everything from scratch. Where to Download Ready-Made Shaders for the Game’s Scene I would recommend the , which is a great place for thousands of free or affordably priced assets that save critical time and effort for Unity creators. Unity Asset Store Designers can choose from a massive catalog of 2D and 3D models, SDKs, templates, and tools to speed up their hyper-casual game development. Both Unity Technologies and members of the community create these Assets and publish them to the store. All of these shaders are simple to work with. For example, I'll tell you a little about the . This asset can do a good job of transforming the scene in terms of color and shadows: Flexible Cel Shader As you can see, the scene has become much more light-weighted and easier to perceive. This shader helped to get rid of black shadows, and all elements blend well together. The scene on the right still needs to be completed, but the shaders already look much more like something that can be seen in a simple hyper-casual game. Once the shaders asset is applied, it’s time to adjust the shaders of different objects according to the needs and the idea of a particular hyper-casual game. Step-by-step Unity Shader Setup Guide Setting up shaders in Unity is quite simple. The path to the black belt in shaders looks like this: . Add the floor, or something else from a scene, and select a shader that doesn’t have an outline. It could be the . 1. Create new material Flexible Cel Shader 2. In my case, I want to use a plank pattern for the floor. Consequently, I should load a picture with it in the necessary color. In addition, I pay attention to whether there are textures here. If not, then my picture should be just a solid color, selected before. Go to Base Color and Textures, and choose the texture for the object. 3. . It allows us to change the color of the whole object immediately. I used this feature to add a color hue to the floor color. If the initial color looks fine, this step is unnecessary. Go to the Global Color Modifier 4. . It helps set the border between light and shadow. By default, this feature shows two ramp levels (gradations of shadows). I can change this setting and add more gradation, but in this case, I don't need it. Set up the Lighting Ramp **5. Adjust High Light.**It allows us to adjust the color and brightness of the illuminated part of the subject. For example, I can leave the color white and set up the brightness. So in the scene, the object looks as close as possible to the color I initially planned (not too dark, but not over-lit). 6. . Choose a color that imposes on the texture in shadows. It would also be nice to adjust the intensity so that this color is slightly darker than the base color. Also, it’s better to avoid grey or black. Adjust Low Light 7. **Set up the outline.**Setting the color and size of the outline is the last step of working with shaders. This part might be skipped. All the other textures are configured in the same way. The core principle is setting the base color and adjusting the color and the saturation of the shadows. Wrap Up The configuration of shaders is an important step in creating a hyper-casual scene, which comes between the choice of colors and shapes and finishing the final scene look with textures, details, and interface. This is simple to start working with but a powerful parameter allows the scene to look much more smooth and more enjoyable for players. Be sure to use its power from the very first attempts to create a hyper-casual game. Keep in mind  the basic simple rules for setting up shaders, experiment with downloadable assets, and be prepared to go the extra mile if you want to achieve something really spectacular. Photo by on Zdeněk Macháček Unsplash

How to Configure Hyper-casual Game Shaders With Unity 

Gaming has long helped to popularize innovative technologies. This holds true for blockchain, where games already span distinct sub-categories. The play-to-earn model is typified by Axie Infinity, in which players collect and battle little monsters represented by NFTs that can be transacted with other players. Other games include Decentraland, a metaverse game where players use a native token to purchase in-game items represented as NFTs. Such games have introduced hundreds of thousands of gamers to blockchain technology. But this early growth has been constrained by the technical limitations of blockchain platforms to date. Most popular blockchain-based games — including Axie Infinity, Decentraland, and the Sandbox — run on Ethereum. With Ethereum still awaiting its transition to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, issues with speed and scalability continue to prevent blockchain-based gaming from truly taking off. Ethereum currently maxes at about 19 transactions per second at peak times. Consider that the popular online survival game Fortnite has anywhere between 1 million and 3 million concurrent players. If even a fraction of them were to try interacting and transacting simultaneously on Ethereum, it would create serious congestion problems and rising transaction and storage fees. Because storing in-game data on Ethereum is prohibitively expensive, these games typically rely on a layer-two solution or centralized servers, with layer-two protocols lacking the security of the game’s underlying blockchain and centralized servers being single sources of failure. Newer layer-one protocols are paving the way for blockchain-based games that can truly scale. Among the most intriguing is the Internet Computer, which supports end-to-end decentralized gaming experiences and is currently the focus of a tech demo being built by a major gaming studio. A Decentralized Gaming Platform “At best, classic blockchains such as Ethereum are settlement layers in the Web3 gaming ecosystem. High transactional (gas) fees and consensus latency make integration with games prohibitive,” explains Andrew Tang, a former executive of Unity Technologies who is now general manager of Web3 games at the DFINITY Foundation. “The Internet Computer was invented and built from the ground up to address the financial and technical challenges of integrating blockchain with the cloud-based tech stack, making it the only viable option for the possibility and scalability of true Web3 gaming.” Tang is overseeing the development of that is being developed in stealth by “one of the world’s top game studios.” Screenshots and video clips suggest an open-world metaverse game of some kind, although Tang is currently not at liberty to share further details. a tech demo making the rounds on social media “We are collaborating with an external studio that has been working on a new metaverse project called ,” he offers. “The unannounced studio has agreed to build a tech demo on the Internet Computer as a proof of concept.” IC1101 The demo features the integration of a PokedStudio NFT, one of 10,000 unique bots designed by the digital artist Jonathan Ball and hosted on-chain, demonstrating the feasibility of such integrations. Tang also revealed that the tech demo plans to incorporate multi-chain NFT marketplaces that will support major NFT series, from Bored Ape Yacht Club to CryptoPunks. This will allow recognizable brands to include branded digital objects in games that can be owned as NFTs, as well as traded with other users and potentially transferred to other titles. Virtual land could also be owned by players, while the use of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) could give gamers more influence over the development of the games they play than they’ve ever had. The use of NFTs in Web3 games has generated much excitement and hype, largely because they promise to create an external, secondary market for items generated and used within the games. Some games are even positioning themselves to financialize video games and gamers, as indicated by the development of a sub-sector within blockchain gaming known as “GameFi,” in which gaming and DeFi combine to allow gamers to lend their NFTs. The studio behind the IC1101 demo will emerge from stealth in the near future and offer more information on its project, Tang says, but meanwhile other projects are demonstrating the possibilities of Web3 gaming. is a John Wick-inspired third-person shooter in which the user navigates a 3D world and avoids gunfire from anonymous agents. The game, which is still a demo, is built using Unity, a cross-platform game engine. The Internet Computer’s ability to integrate any pre-existing game engine is another factor that widens the scope of the gaming ecosystem that will run on the blockchain. Mission Is Possible “Unity may be the preferred option for certain platforms such as mobile, while Unreal may be more suitable for PC,” explains Tang, referring to another major gaming engine. “Open-source engines such as O3DE and Godot are also viable options. The choice depends on the needs of the project and the available resources that can harness the power of modern game engines.” There are basically two approaches to developing games on the Internet Computer. The first involves building and running both the frontend/user interface (HTML5) and the backend on the blockchain. The second involves developers building the frontend on custom hardware (e.g., PC, consoles) while running the backend on-chain. “Deploying the entire stack fully on-chain is optimal from a security standpoint. However, this approach limits rendering capabilities (WebGL) compared to deploying the frontend on hardware with modern GPUs,”  Tang notes. “Hence we’re investing in R&D efforts on an IC-native game engine (codename Fahrenheit32) that implements the next-gen graphics APIs (i.e., WebGPU, Vulkan), intending to eliminate the tradeoff between performance and security for 100% on-chain deployment.” Building and running everything on-chain opens up a number of exciting possibilities. “If the entire game stack can be built on the blockchain, then there would be no need to spend valuable resources to solve potential integration challenges and security problems (e.g., relying on third-party blockchain oracles) with the Web2 stack,” he explains. The Internet Computer’s architecture organizes individual nodes running in independent data centers into subnetwork blockchains called subnets, which can communicate with one another. Nodes and subnets can be added to increase scalability. The subnets host smart contracts that do everything from computing simple transactions to running dapps and serving web content. They run in parallel, much like “shards” in other chains, and are responsible for processing their own sets of transactions and computations. The blockchain’s protocol suite enables it to sign transactions using only a single public key, and its asynchronous consensus mechanism allows new blocks of transactions to be finalized within two seconds of being proposed. These features make it capable of 11,500 transactions per second for update calls that record data and of 250,000 per second for read-only query calls. A reverse-gas model also relieves end users of needing a crypto wallet or tokens to interact with the blockchain, making it easier to onboard new users. “It is 100% possible now with the Internet Computer for blockchain-based gaming to reach full potential, as we have discovered that it has the same capabilities as any other configurable and customized centralized server,” says Omar Hernandez Salmeron, the founder and CEO of , a real-time space-themed strategy game in early development. “Low transaction costs, high scalability, high memory computing power, powerful, compatible variety of programming languages, and low latency along with reverse-gas fees are just exactly what was needed to achieve this.” Cosmicrafts As with other examples of the blockchain gaming genre, Cosmicrafts makes extensive use of NFTs, allowing players to trade, stake, and farm them. Unlike many more established titles, its NFTs and tokens are hosted on-chain along with its website and interface. This degree of decentralization signals the promise of taking power away from centralized providers such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. It also reduces single points of failure, something that continues to affect internet users even today. “From single-player arcade games to MMOs, we will demonstrate to the developer community that 100% on-chain games are not only possible on the Internet Computer, but preferable over various attempts to integrate blockchains with cloud-based solutions,” says Tang. One other important feature is that blockchain-based games, much like their traditional counterparts, will be able to be played by millions of gamers at the same time. “It’s just a matter of time until the IC starts to add more and more subnets that will enable billions of users,” says Bartek Laskowski, the developer of Mission Is Possible. “The great thing is that developers don't have to care about scaling issues.” Realizing this promise could deliver the de-facto universal layer for Web3 gaming — one  with the necessary speed and scalability to run blockchain-based games for millions of concurrent users, creating new use cases for in-game NFTs and cryptocurrencies. While it’s still only early days, developers are increasingly recognizing the potential of a thriving decentralized gaming ecosystem.

A Decentralized Layer for Web3 Gaming

One of the main mobile app development trends that will surely stay in the market is hybrid mobile app development. A report by shows so many choices of frameworks that will let developers build hybrid apps. However, React Native and Flutter were the top two hybrid frameworks in 2019 and 2020. Statista According to the above-mentioned report, 42 percent of global developers used React Native as their preferred Hybrid app development framework in 2019 and 2020. On the Second number, Flutter had a penetration rate of 30 percent in worldwide developers in 2019, which later increased in 2020 and touched a threshold of 39 percent of developers globally. But we will not deny that there are other frameworks as well that can fulfill your hybrid app development needs. Apart from these two best hybrid app frameworks, many modern developers are moving towards other options like- Xamarin, Unity, Dojo, and Corona among others. Important Statistics for Cross-Platform Mobile App Developers Before we proceed further and talk about the benefits of hybrid frameworks and a few leading names in the market, let’s dive into some statistics from the same market segment. Android and iOS apps are responsible for 70 percent of online traffic ( ) Flutter Community 87 percent of mobile users spend their time on mobile apps ( ) Comscore Mobile app downloads are expected to cross a threshold of 258 billion by 2022 ( ) Statista Benefits of the Hybrid Mobile App Development Frameworks Before we proceed to the list of best app development frameworks, it is better to know about the functions of the best framework. Faster development is the main advantage The headache of rewriting codes from scratch for each OS will not exist It will be easy to find bugs in codes written on these frameworks Sharing of codes will be easier Already developed UI components saves time and codes on design the entire UI Best Hybrid Mobile App Development Frameworks Furthermore, we are going to pick a few best hybrid development frameworks from the app development industry and discuss them. We will take factors such as Popularity, review, and expert opinions into consideration to pick these revolutionary technologies of the modern mobile app development trends. 1. React Native This Java-based mobile app development framework is quite popular among experienced developers and top app development companies. Famous brands such as Uber, Microsoft, and Facebook have already adopted React Native for their mobile app development needs. The hybrid framework possesses the feature of letting you build natively rendered iOS and Android mobile applications. The native approach is a hack to work around pain points in React Native. Native plugins should be used to expose low-level general features that you can then build on top of from JS.? - Brent Vatne, Editor of Exposition ( ) Source React Native has its inception history going back to 2015 when Facebook released it as an open-source project. Due to being used by one of the top social media companies, within a couple of years, React Native became popular among developers. Some advantages of React Native like creating code once for iOS and Android apps, and the freedom to create robust apps gave it a push on the top. 2. Flutter This open-source hybrid app development framework is a child of Google. Commonly used for Android, Windows, iOS, and Linux app development, this framework is expected to leave React Native behind in the next few years. Google had released Flutter initially in 2017. There are two parts of the Flutter hybrid framework for which developers use it- Software Development Kit (SDK) and UI Library. Flutter SDK has tools to assist developers in building apps for iOS, Android, or Windows among other operating systems. UI Library has elements such as Widgets, buttons, and texts, among others, that developers can reuse. 3. Ionic Popular brands such as NASA, and Amtrak among others are using Ionic to build high-performance mobile applications easily. This open-source framework is a perfect choice to build Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) and High-performance mobile applications. The framework includes UI components, front-end building block libraries, and other design elements to build the best Android and iOS mobile apps. The framework uses the best programming languages in the market, such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. 4. Xamarin This open-source app development framework by Microsoft is used to build high-quality iOS, Android, and Windows mobile apps. The common features that Xamarin offers are Memory Allocation and Garbage Collection. The hybrid app development framework lets users build mobile apps that will not require the rewriting of up to 90 percent of codes. Developers can write these apps on PC or Mac and compile them in .apk or .ipa format, depending on the target operating system. Developers can use this framework to write cross-platform mobile apps with the C# language. cross-platform app development 5. Kendo UI This HTML5 based user interface framework helps developers in building cross-platforms with high performance but less development time. Its library includes more than 70 widgets and plenty of data visualization gadgets. If you want to build an app with advanced functionalities but in less time, Kendo UI is a perfect pick for you. 6. Unity Unity is mainly used to develop cross-platform smartphone games. Initially, Unity Technologies released it in June 2005. The hybrid app development framework can help you in building a 3-D environment, elements, characters, and more. If you are into game development or work for industries such as Automation, Animation, or Marketing, among others- Unity can help you in building high-quality gaming apps. The hybrid framework can decouple the module dependencies in mobile apps by giving them an object at the runtime itself. Key Takeaways on Hybrid Mobile App Development Frameworks With time, the adoption of hybrid frameworks will increase due to their popularity among users that is increasing rapidly. Moreover, it also gives more benefits to developers as well. However, hybrid frameworks are not very ideal for heavy games and apps with too many features, as being cross-platform brings a few limitations for these hybrid apps. Before we wind up this blog, let’s have a look at a few key points we discussed above for a revision: Hybrid apps are less costlier and demand fewer maintenance costs as well These apps save developers from rewriting codes from scratch for each operating system React Native is a Java-based hybrid app development framework Flutter is an open-source hybrid app development framework released by Google Ionic is being used by tech-giants such as NASA Well, surely with time, there will be new names that we talk about in the future. However, for now, these hybrid frameworks can be trusted blindly. Hopefully, you got the information you were looking for Until next time, Happy Programming!

For Both Android & iOS: Top 6 Hybrid Mobile App Development Frameworks

Leaders from Playtika, Unity Technologies, and Infinity Games share some of the challenges they’ve faced and solutions for delivering highly engaging games. In 2020, the mobile gaming industry saw a massive spike in engagement and revenues, growing more than 13% year over year. With game quality and performance being of critical importance to stakeholders in the space, improving it has become top priority for mobile game development and QA teams globally. At Apptim , we’ve been collaborating with several teams within the mobile game industry to better understand how they approach game performance testing. With that aim in mind, we invited , Performance Test Manager at , and , QA Lead at to join our CEO, , and , Quality Engineering Manager at , for a panel discussion and Q&A session about mobile game testing! Aliaksandr Kavaliou Playtika Robson Siebel Infinity Games Sofia Palamarchuk Melissa Eaden Unity Technologies Below is a recap of the webinar ( see video here ), including questions by the audience: What Are Some of the Biggest Mobile Game Testing Challenges You’ve Faced? shared that one of the biggest challenges teams find themselves tackling first is testing on the myriad of different devices and operating systems that are a direct result of the growing fragmentation within the Android ecosystem. For example, the emergence of newer devices every year, makes testing more complex than ever before. Melissa Mobile game testing and quality isn’t only focused on functionality and performance, Eaden shared. She and her colleagues are focused on helping Unity developers to make games that are engaging and interactive enough that keep players coming back again and again. Some other areas in game quality that present challenges, she added, were: Ensuring compliance with new privacy laws and regulations such as GDPR, Testing ads and third party integrations, and How to create games with high-quality, using advanced features such as inter-player chat, matching, awards, etc. shared that at Infinity Games, they create games that are designed to be immersive and relaxing, so there’s nothing worse than a user finding a bug, thus ruining their experience. Worse, if that user that experienced a buggy game leaves a negative review on the app store, it could lead to a negative financial impact for the business. Robson Another challenge for his team in particular is that they don’t have a dedicated tester, which, in the past, had resulted in devs being handed over imprecise or less helpful bug reports than desired. For , his greatest challenges at Playtika revolve around capacity testing / capacity planning on a huge setup. Aliaksandr He explained, “Once you have more than one data center, hundreds of virtual machines, a lot of Kubernetes setups and so on… data warehouses, databases, and hundreds of thousands or millions of users, and you’re awaiting a new feature or a marketing campaign that is expected to generate a user traffic increase… Planning for this enormous setup is a headache, really.” The second biggest challenge he mentioned in for games is the high cost of running end-to-end performance tests. The closer to production, the more expensive it is for any team to run these tests. He elaborated, the cheaper the tests are, the less realistic numbers you can obtain, and you can’t somehow approximate those results and understand what exactly you need and how much to scale. mobile performance testing What Are Some Ways You’ve Overcome These Challenges? For , he has found ways to help his team overcome the challenge of not having dedicated testers. He assumed the role of the QA lead and also adopted Apptim, which has helped enable anyone on the team to run functional and performance tests on their games. Robson He shared that, before Apptim, “The bug reports were either vague or they were sometimes incorrect and that led to a lot of wasted time for the developer trying to hunt or to reproduce a bug.” He continued, “Being able to have a tool that recorded the play session of the person and automatically got all of the logs and generated a performance report in the end, is something that for us, as a small company, was pretty huge. We’ve improved the quality of the games a lot because of the crashes or exceptions that we couldn’t catch before, and now we have that access.” shared that, to deal with the high cost of end-to-end mobile game performance tests, he found you can reuse existing automation tests. He commented, “It will also save you time in such cases because almost every time you have automation already created for your functionality, why not or some [performance] measurements, and it will help you to also understand what’s going on where you are.” Aliaksandr add some markers But, he warns, although that’ll help, it can’t protect you from bad code and a bad configuration, so a lot of effort and attention should be placed on the configuration of your performance test, not to saturate earlier than expected due to some numbers conflicting somewhere. “That’s why it’s hard, step-by-step analytical work,” he asserted. What is Your Advice for Reducing Testing as a Bottleneck? For , the short answer may seem controversial to testers, but she shared that the best thing she’s learned to do is to get out of the developers’ way. She said, Melissa “Removing myself has been the biggest, reducing that bottleneck, putting automation in place, letting the developers really collaborate on those ideas and moving the production cycles and everything faster because I am not stationed on a team, I’m not embedded, but I’m there as somebody that can coach them and help them.” She explained that she’s a big advocate of modern testing principles, which give a lot of credence and leverage to the teams themselves. “Developers know the code the best, the more they interact with the code and the more they understand the code, the more they can test it, and they can test it on a level that oftentimes as someone who was traditionally in the role of a tester might not be able to get to.” She continued, this is the collaborative part; helping developers understand where their knowledge gaps are and that’s where she comes in. She’ll often be the person that asks questions like, “Hey, you’ve developed this wonderful piece of functionality, but did you think about how to scale it?” She remarked that there are a lot of moving pieces and developers are really well positioned to handle that. It’s about helping developers uncover their blind spots. Melissa added, “So I’m not perfect, they’re not perfect, but getting out of the collective folks’ way that deal with the code on a day-to-day basis has really improved removing that bottleneck from the development process, along with adding in DevOps and CI/CD practices, which have just made things a lot easier.” “Automation always makes things easier as much as it makes it harder, but you have to balance the positive with the negative, right?” The first answer that came to mind about reducing testing as a bottleneck was, “You can always ask the developer to stop creating bugs. That works very well.” Robson’s Kidding aside, he shared that in his experience, having a well-defined test pipeline in a reliable software that can automate some of the steps goes really a long way. Another key area of improvement has been reducing the friction between developers and whomever is testing the games: “Using a tool like Apptim for that can also help catch some underlying bugs and reduce the friction between the tester and the developer because sometimes there is a lot of back and forth.” To illustrate the point, he said, “Today, I had an issue where someone reported a bug. ‘Hey, this is happening at the end of level six of the game.’ I checked the video from Apptim because he was using it for that session, and it was actually at level 10. So if I didn’t have the video to back it up, I might have lost quite a lot of time chasing a bug that didn’t really exist.” How is Testing a Mobile Game Different Than Testing Other Mobile Apps? The consensus among the panel was the added complexity that games have at different levels and understanding how they interact. stated, Melissa “Mobile apps are complex as it is, but you have multiple platforms you’re looking at, and then you multiply that by the game complexity and the algorithms and the performance you have to maintain.” Melissa shared several other factors that add more complexity in mobile game testing: Handoffs between ads, online chatting, or any other auxiliary things that your app is doing besides just being a game. Dealing with game performance, device performance, and network performance. Testing various ad layouts and formats: For example, you can have a full page static ads, banner ads, video ads, etc. Non-linear usage and behavior patterns from users open a wide array of possibilities. Depending on the order that the user does something, you might find a different bug. What Aspects of Non-Functional Testing Like Performance Do You Prioritize in Your Games and Where? For , when choosing where to prioritize performance, he stated areas like the game lobby and anything a brand new player will see first are top priority. Aliaksandr He explained that, for a fresh player, he or she should see the functionality of your game as soon as possible and enter the game fast. This aspect should be the most prioritized because players will not want to wait a long time to get started. But, he added, it depends on what experience the user has during the waiting; “If it’s something interesting, he interacts with something, even during the game, during the waiting lobby or whatever inside the game, it’s maybe a good thing. But if he sees just a blank page and a spinner, it’ll make him crazy. Of course, for fresh users, I suppose getting to the lobby as fast as possible is a critical thing, but then other features should work also fine.” How Do You Set Mobile Game Performance Benchmarks? volunteered to expand upon this follow up to the previous question, saying that it can be measured from the number of users. But first, it’s important to understand business critical transactions. Then step by step, you can do benchmarking, load testing, and so on. He also shared, “Use such a tool as Apptim to and see what’s wrong with these events, with this transaction, this feature, deep dive, and use code profiling… and so on.” Aliaksandr set markers He stated that self-written solutions will be the most accurate because you inject something in your code and this code will show the real duration, but it takes time to do. Therefore, if you have a good profiler on hand, which can easily show you the bottlenecks, then it’s better to use that at first. Don’t forget to for more insights from our guests in this panel discussion and check out similar videos on our . watch the full webinar Youtube channel This article was originally published here: https://blog.apptim.com/mobile-game-testing-qa-panel/

What Mobile Gaming Industry Leaders Think About Testing Challenges

As someone who has used both and Unity to make games, I read with extreme interest a post by about the announcement of AppOnboard's new CEO, Mike Seavers. This could be one of the biggest wins for the company ever since Jonathan Zweig and AppOnboard . himself is an experienced entrepreneur, having co-founded AdColony in 2008 (sold to Opera for $350m in 2014) and co-founded AppOnboard in 2016. AppOnboard has raised $35m from investors, according to , and the new appointment could lead to new funding rounds when the time is right. This is going to lead to a very interesting David vs Goliath battle between AppOnboard's Buildbox and Unity Technologies. Buildbox Venturebeat acquired Buildbox last year Zweig Crunchbase Meet the Goliath: Unity Technologies Unity is a behemoth in the world of games development. Some stats: Founded 2004. .$1.3bn .Led by John Riccitiello. CV includes being CEO at EA, stints at PepsiCo and Clorox and co-founding Elevation Partners in 2004.Unity's engine was launched in 2005.Unity's engine can be used with over 25 gaming platforms.1.3 million developers use Unity's engine. 2,000+ employees worldwide funding raised Meet the David: Buildbox Buildbox is the David in this battle. Firstly, let us look at some stats about AppOnboard, the company that acquired it: Founded in 2016.Raised $35m from investors. Between 11-50 employees . Acquired Buildbox in 2019.Buildbox was founded in 2014 by Trey Smith and Nik Rudenko. The company that over 100 games built with Buildbox have been featured by Apple, with and growing (announced in 2019, the numbers would have grown since then). Some of the most famous games built with Buildbox include , Color Switch, The Pit and many more. according to Crunchbase announced in 2017 500,000 Buildbox users Phases, The Line Zen Why Seavers Is Important to Buildbox's Future Mike Seavers comes from Riot Games. PC gamers will know them as the creators of and . is one of the biggest eSports titles, with numerous competitions and teams vying to compete for titles. Valorant, despite being a newer game, has the potential to be one of the biggest multiplayer shooters, right up there with and . League of Legends Valorant League of Legends Apex Legends Call of Duty: Warzone Seavers has over 25 years' experience in the gaming industry,  as notes: "Seavers is a 25-year game and software veteran who was most recently CTO of Riot Games and was heavily involved in the creation of Riot’s Legends of Runeterra as well as League of Legends." Venturebeat This level of experience will be crucial to help Buildbox grow and compete against bigger competitors such as Unity Technologies as well as smaller competitors such as YoYo Games' GameMaker Studio 2. How Can Buildbox tackle Unity? There are nine key things Seavers can do in the short to long term: Get publishers on board. Challenge Unity Technologies on pricing. Enable console exports. Improve Android 3D performance. Launch an asset store. Add multiplayer. Make the software work offline. Out-innovate Unity. Ensure Buildbox is on the lips of every developer. Get More Publishers On Board If Seavers wants to make waves, he should strike partnerships with as many game publishers as possible. The company has already made a partnership with British mobile game publisher and this is a good start to getting more users. More please. A deal with Voodoo.io, one of the giants of the hyper-casual game world, would be great (the company has published games made with Buildbox before) but a deal with a PC or console game publisher would be a coup.  AppOnboard is young and scrappy enough to make deals to help it grow rapidly. Kwalee Challenge Unity On Pricing If Buildbox really wants to make a dent, make users a deal they cannot refuse. Unity's personal plan is extremely tempting for first time game developers as it offers access to a lot for functionality for free. The company has dedicated plans for businesses, something Buildbox does not. AppOnboard could help Buildbox make a splash by offering a competitive plan for first time users (perhaps by introducing a certain amount of free mobile exports for its free plan) and introducing a business plan for teams of developers keen to use the software. Enable Console Exports In Buildbox Why can't we have Buildbox built games on Nintendo's eShop? Or on the PlayStation 4? Xbox One? This would be a great way to showcase some of the amazing games built with software ( by TapMen would be a good fit, for example) With the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X set to launch less than a few months away, this would make an excellent weapon in Seavers' arsenal. Improve Android Performance In Buildbox 3D GamesThis is where Seavers' engineering prowess could shine. 3D Android games built with Buildbox don't have the same level of performance as their iPhone counterparts. Unity, on the other hand, offers great performance for both platforms no matter the device. An improvement to the engine could help even out the playing field and encourage more Android developers to come on board. One Wheel Launch an Asset Store For Buildbox Users One of the biggest attractions of using Unity is the asset store. You can get everything from templates to asset packs at competitive prices. An asset store for Buildbox users would be a great step in attracting more developers to the software. AppOnboard could even offer a subscription service, offering a certain amount of products every month for a fixed fee. Multiplayer Should Be As Easy As The Software Itself Multiplayer will eventually be coming to Buildbox. This should help attract more users by adding a much requested feature. The company should aim to make it easy as possible to implement, which would lure away any potential Unity users. Make Buildbox Work Offline Perhaps one of the biggest disadvantages Buildbox has over Unity is that you can't use it offline. You need a constant internet connection to use the software. AppOnboard need to get this changed soon. Not every user will have a reliable internet connection and this could be a massive selling point once solved. Out-Innovate Unity Augmented reality, virtual reality and machine learning are just three of the technologies that could potentially be huge in the future. AppOnboard could out-innovate Unity Technologies by partnering with exciting new startups developing new applications in these areas and helping to implement them in Buildbox. Shout from the Rooftops! One of the biggest challenges Buildbox faces is that some developers do not view it seriously. This is a problem that can be solved with the right positioning in the market - perhaps to solve this, there could be another version called 'Buildbox Pro' aimed at businesses and teams of developers. Visual scripting: Unity's Ace? One of the often cited alternatives to Buildbox is . Developed by Hutong Games™, this is an affordable visual scripting tool ($65) for Unity. Games like Hearthstone, Hollow Knight and INSIDE were all created with it. AppOnboard needs to emphasize the value offered by Buildbox to create a compelling argument against visual scripting tools. playMaker™ Conclusion Things are going to get very interesting with the new appointment. There must have been something very attractive about Buildbox to get Seavers on board and it will be very exciting to see what changes he makes to help tackle Unity's foothold in the market. Let the battle commence! Previously published at https://staticcatgames.blogspot.com/2020/07/buildbox-versus-unity-let-the-battle-begin.html

Can BuildBox Challenge The Might Of The Unity Game Engine?

What is IssueHunt Fest? IssueHunt Fest is a month-long OSS sponsorship event that happens every year in April and December. IssueHunt Fest 2018 will be the first time commemorable event. At the event, IssueHunt collects funds from sponsors and distribute the funds to OSS projects listed on IssueHunt. Help us build sustainable open source community by participating IssueHunt Fest 2018! Date and time of the event:Starts: December 1, 2018 Ends: December 25, 2018 The economics of open source. Open-source software is the essential infrastructure of the internet stack.OSS consumes developers’ creativity and labor. Developers’ unpaid labor build OSS. Before we build IssueHunt, we managed open-source software Boostnote, a note-taking app for developers. The project got over 11k+ Github stars in two years, and hundreds of developers contributed to our project. _A markdown editor for developers on Mac, Windows and Linux. - BoostIO/Boostnote_github.com BoostIO/Boostnote Initially, we made IssueHunt as bounty program for Boostnote. The concept of IssueHunt worked very well where many issues resolved in a few days. Our experience with Boostnote, made us realize issue based open-source bounty has the potential to improve the open-source ecosystem overall. We think enthusiastic open source developers are not appropriately rewarded no matter how much they contribute to the technology evolution.Many leading projects use open-source software, but no matter how they are essential, the owners of those projects juggle multiple jobs to sustain their living. We want to fix this situation by nurturing a healthy open-source ecosystem. What can we do to return the favor to OSS developers?IssueHunt enables us to reward OSS developers from small amount as a glass of beer. Start creating a sustainable open source ecosystem together with . IssueHunt How do I participate IssueHunt Fest 2018? Create an account on with Github. Submit a PR to any public GitHub repository listed on IssueHunt. Browse open issues labeled “IssueHuntFest” for inspiration. https://issuehunt.io/ Maintaining a repo?? Create issues labeled on your GitHub projects to help new contributors know what to work on. “IssueHuntFest” Or you can send us fund request from the form below. https://goo.gl/forms/Xwlpg06w7iUQgUR33 Bounty hunter?? Earn stickers by sending more than 3 PRs on IssueHunt. Earn stickers and T-shirt by becoming top 10 contributors with most rewards. Who is sponsoring the event? Gold: Microsoft Silver: Framgia, LINE Corporation Bronze: Mercari, Cryptoeconomics Lab Goods: JetBrains, Unity Technologies Organize: BoostIO Interested? Become a sponsor of Open Source Projects! Want to boost your community? Want to boost your OSS project development with IssueHunt? Submit your repositories to and get help from developers around the world right away. https://issuehunt.io/ You can easily put a bounty on not only a bug but also on OSS feature requests. Collected funds will be distributed to owner:contributor=20%:80% (You can also customize the proportion). Feel free to comment on this blog if you have any questions!Let’s grow open-source projects together with IssueHunt 🤝

IssueHunt Fest 2018: Make open source sustainable

With more than 40% market share in mobile games, billion monthly active users and 2.6 billion unique devices, Unity plays a profoundly important role in the booming gaming and VR markets. Introducing machine learning and AI into game development will curb one of the greatest expenses in time and money that go into content creation, but will also change the role of programmers. With immense access to data and computing power, developers will use historical data to model extensive virtual realities of games, taking programming out of the equation. Sing up to my newsletter Exponential View to receive weekly updates on the most pressing questions in technology HERE I spoke with Dr Danny Lange, VP of AI and machine learning at Unity about this, the present and future of game development, machine learning, and how developers and startups can get most out of it. We cover a range of topics, including: The difference between artificial intelligence and machine learning The paradigm shift from deterministic to probabilistic computing How to deliver machine learning in a large company How it changes the role of management How (and when) software engineers may become irrelevant Dr Danny Lange is VP of AI and machine learning at Unity Technologies. Before joining Unity, he led the machine learning efforts at Uber, Amazon and Microsoft. Through his work on General Motor’s OnStar Virtual Advisor, Danny provided the foundation for the development of one of the largest deployments of an intelligent personal assistant until the arrival of Siri. Prior to joining General Magic, Dr. Lange was Visiting Scientist at IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory, 1993 to 1997, where he is known for his invention of the Java Aglet, a lightweight mobile agent for the Java programming environment. In addition to his software agent work, he has also made significant contributions in the areas of hypertext technology, object-oriented database modeling, and Design Pattern visualization techniques. For weekly updates sign up to Exponential View here

How do you deliver machine learning in a large company?

Interview with Oscar Clark from Unity 3D Wearer of many hats and a veteran of online, mobile and console games services, he’s also a monetisation expert and data maestro — check out his — We caught up with him: Oscar Clark, games designer, consultant and Evangelist for Unity Technologies, has been encouraging developers with his expertise in gameplay best practices for years, helping to improve their development and make killer experiences. Analytics & The Player Lifecycle post and webinar Q As Evangelist at Unity Technologies you help developers overcome the hurdles they may be facing with changes in emerging technology. Is there an underlying theme arising which may stop a potential success? The key thing is having a focus on you audience; but this has become more complicated as now our players also have their own audience. Social connections are incredibly important to games whether that’s directly with your gaming friends or indirectly with video sharing of gameplay. Q Personally, what do you find most exciting about VR & AR today? It’s the potential to explore new ways to play and tell stories. Think about how ‘ ’ delivers a completely absorbing experience and yet still allows me to communicate with the other people in the room with me; or the way lets me feel that I am a real starship pilot fighting other real players live. Then there are the narrative pieces like which pulls together a beautiful moving diorama that has the feel of theatre and yet the animation of film. As Al Jolson once said “You ain’t seen nothing yet!” Keep Talking And No-one Explodes Eve Valkyrie Allumette Q You authored — and encouraged developers to create free play design — what are the bare bones of this strategy? Games as a Service Basically this is about realising that we should be focused on building Utility (value) for our players from within the game; reasons for them to continue playing and hopefully also to spend money with us in ways which make everyone’s play more enjoyable. Who is better at selling your game? The Appstore which has 500+ new games everyday or you as the designer? More than that, Games As A Service is about recognising that we are building a long term relationship with players and want to keep them playing (and hopefully watching Opt-In Ads and paying too for things they value!). However, this model is also about scale and AR/VR isn’t in that territory yet. For now we are more likely to see games which focus on learning what the platform can offer to an audience who can become advocates to grow the market. That often means building amazing one-off experiences which dedicated fans will love and pay for in advance. It also means that every time a game is released which makes someone sick, or otherwise damages their experience, it will drag us all down and delay the adoption. Quality matters and I am sure thats something the AR/VR App Stores absolutely appreciate. Q Your recent trip to Jordan took you to the International Mobile Gaming Awards (IMGA) where you were on the panel of judges- what was your biggest takeaway from this event? There are two key things I learned (apart from how amazingly welcoming Jordan was to us). First, the Arabic market potential is huge and largely undeserved. This is not just a question of language however, and also means taking into account the needs of the region from a cultural perspective. Secondly, it was the power of passion. Here is a country in the middle of the Middle-East investing in the passion of its youth by using games development to drive growth and with surprisingly good results despite how fresh the industry is there. Oh and there were more women attending the event than I have ever seen in any other region. Q Tell us a bit about your Rocky Horror show inspired app that you’ve created I’ve been a fan of Rocky Horror since I was 18 and when the chance to make a game based on it came up, I did that ‘Jump to the Left’. Working with any brand really means you have to deeply understand it and in particular the sources which lead to its emergence. That means to me that we have to respect the old Sci-fi and Horror B-Movies as well as the way that the Cult following engages. For us its always about audience partici….. pation. Q What other advice would you give to developers wanting to create some amazing experiences? Have a vision for what you are setting out to achieve; then simplify and simplify some more. Players usually need a frame of reference, something familiar as a starting point before they can accept new ideas without getting confused. But then, change one thing in a way which transitions their expectations but also makes a perfect use of the medium. Don’t try to make Call of Duty in VR; try to re-imagine the experience of a soldier in WW2 using the constraints and opportunities that VR presents us. Q Are you looking forward to speaking at VRAR With The Best in December? Of course! — what a great way to connect with other creative minds who are focused on delivering amazing experiences! We can’t wait for you to join us Oscar! Thank you! You don’t have to be mad to VR/AR… But It Helps Oscar will be opening the second day of our upcoming VRAR With The Best , Online Developer Conference with his Keynote: on Sunday 4th December. Don’t miss it!

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