Unity Technologies Celebrates Six Years of Indie Game Development Goodness

The leading Indie game engine celebrates its sixth birthday.

PRESS RELEASE

SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwire – June 06, 2011) – Unity Technologies, provider of the Unity development platform for awesome games and interactive 3D on the web, iOS, Android, consoles and beyond, today celebrated Unity’s sixth anniversary.

Unity, launched onstage at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in 2005, is commemorating six years of steadfast leadership and relentless innovation in democratizing game development and making it possible for everyone to create rich interactive 3D content.

“We bet on broad democratization of game development and have been aggressively coding and innovating to realize that vision,” said David Helgason, CEO of Unity Technologies. “We just surpassed the 500,000 user milestone, our customers continue to amaze us with their creations, and we are expanding our team at a rapid rate. It’s exciting to be both an instigator and a participant in this revolution.”

A few of the things that have happened in the last 12 months:

Unity was named the #1 Game Engine by Game Developer Magazine readers, received Develop Magazine’s coveted Grand Prix Award and won the prestigious Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award Unity became the platform of choice for teaching students how to design and develop games

The company’s registered user base surpassed 500,000 users; 150,000 of these users are active monthly users representing well over a million hours of game development every month

The free Unity browser plugin for playing web games exceeded 60 million installs

Unity and the Unity Web Player were certified by the US Army and Air Force so they can be installed on their secure networks

The third generation of Unity, with dozens of major new features, 100+ additional enhancements and up to 10x performance improvements, and support for Android were released

The company teamed with Qualcomm to bring Augmented Reality (AR) to Android The number of Unity games in the Apple iOS App Store exceeded 1500 — “best of” and “top selling” games include Battleheart, Gears, Samurai II, Skee-Ball and Snuggle Truck

The company rocked Game Developers Conference (GDC) in a big way and won Best of Show The company announced a deep partnership Electronic Arts (EA)

The company launched the Unity Asset Store, a digital marketplace where developers can share and sell assets to accelerate development, and it’s quickly become the #1 marketplace for Unity developers

The company introduced Union, a business unit dedicated to distributing high quality 3D games on mobile phones, tablets, set-top boxes, connected TVs and other new platforms — Union announced a partnership with Sony Ericsson to enable rapid development and porting of Unity-based games to the new Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY smartphone and a partnership with RIM to bring dozens of Unity-based games to the PlayBook

For the full list of awards and accolades, simply visit:
http://unity3d.com/company/fast-facts.

Dead Island looks Truly Killer

Just announced today, The upcoming zombie slaughter game, Dead Island, released their announcement trailer today and it truly is chilling. It really speaks to itself, and will leave even the most hard core zombie slayer, a little teary eyed, and anxious for what we can see next.

No release date yet, I’m sure we can expect TONS out of this game at this years E3, platforms confirmed for 360, PS3, and PC.

Check it…

Dead Island

Felicia Day Stars in Dragon Age Web-Series

Today’s news announced the upcoming release of Dragon Age: Redemption starring Felicia Day as the Elven Assassin, Tallis. The web series is gaining a lot of buzz, as Dragon Age is considered one of the most iconic fantasy games out there. BioWare is releasing a second installment to the Dragon Age game series later this year. Dragon Age II is set to hit stores March 8th.

“I’m a huge Dragon Age fan,” said Day of the product. “I was thrilled when the opportunity to work with BioWare materialized. Dragon Age: Redemption allows me to tell a fantasy story in a new way, using a universe I really love. It has been a dream working together.”

With fantastical sets, superb Actors, and an epic fantasy storyline this web series is sure to get Dragon Age fans excited. Day will unveil Dragon Age: Redemption on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon Wednesday February 16th.

“Champions Online” Free To Play Relaunch Goes Off Faster Than A Speeding Bullet

Yesterday, January 25th, Cryptic Studio’s superhero MMO ” Champions Online” went Live with it’s new Free To Play model, and the game’s population has octupled.

Yesterday, January 25th, Cryptic Studio’s superhero MMO ” Champions Online” went Live with it’s new Free To Play model.

Twenty four hours since launch, the game’s population has octupled.  You hearing me, “City of Heroes” and “DCUO”?! OCTUPLED!

There’s no official word from Cryptic yet on just how successful this has all been on their end, but I predict some pretty happy faces on some pretty tired developers.

In related news, “Champions Online” executive director also revealed the name of their next Adventure Pack, which is a 2-3 hour story arc that scales with the players level and offers plenty of new titles and costume pieces. It’s called “Resistance”, and we don’t know anything about it right now other than it takes place in Multifaria, an Earth with an alternate timeline where many of Millenium City’s heroes are in face evil tyrants that rule the planet with an iron fist.

And a big ‘congratulations’ to me for winning Cryptic’s “Character Contest“! My character will soon be featured in the game as a quest-giving NPC! More details on that as it arrives!

[Update]

This just in: A new powerset has been revealed called “Heavy Weapons”. The set has you use massive, powerful, but slow melee weapons for incredible crushing damage.

LA Noire – A Glimpse of What’s to Come

The new trailer for Rockstar’s latest title, LA Noire, gives us a glimpse of the new technology they have been raving about


Rockstar Games has been called many things in the past, but more recently the words “game changer” have been thrown around. With their new title, LA Noire, they have taken game graphics to a new level. Rockstar has joined forces with Team Bondi to create some of the most advanced motion capture in game footage we have ever seen.

The way that they achieve such realistic results is to first capture the actor’s body movements with motion capture technology. Then, they send the actor into make up and hair and use scanning technology to get the face and head. They also capture the voice during the scanning process for a more authentic feel to the acting.

The results are almost film-like, but judge for yourselves: