Interview with Unity. Exclusive to App2Top

The other day we had an interesting conversation with Oleg Pridiuk, a technical evangelist from Unity Technologies. We talked about the advantages of the Unity engine and myths about it, about the company as a whole and its strategic plans, as well as why St. Petersburg can be called the heart of Russian game development. 

In what year and where was the company founded?

It all happened in Copenhagen. Specific figures: where, how, and by year, and by name, and by the main milestones can be viewed on the official website.

Probably the most interesting thing is that the guys started everything with a game. They were making a game, and they had to write their own engine. Then it was fashionable to write their own engines, everyone did it then. And the guys realized that they liked it more than creating the game itself. And we decided to focus on the technology itself.

How many developers are using Unity now?

It depends on how you count. Downloaded – more than a million. Regular users – more than 300 thousand. 

How many games are made on Unity in total?

We don’t spy on users :) So I can’t say.

And if we assume?

I’m sure it’s a lot. It’s really thousands of games. Even if we assume that we have a lot of users of free versions, where the entry threshold is zero. I downloaded it, did something, and posted it on the site. 

What is the difference between the free version and the paid one? Why can’t I use the free version all the time?

Can.

And then why buy the paid version? What does it give the developer?

The paid version does not give, but takes 3 thousand dollars from the developer (laughs).

That is, what does the developer get for it?

Opens access to various features. First of all, this is disabling the splash screen – even if it is banal, but for many it is necessary. The second is the various development subtleties, which are clearly illustrated here (http://unity3d.com/unity/licenses.html ). The main idea of the difference between the paid and free versions is that it is quite possible to use the basic license, but absolutely until, for example, you do not need to connect plugins.

That is, it turns out that it is possible to do something simple for novice developers on the free version, and if you want to develop seriously and for a long time, then you need a paid one?

In fact, the most serious limitation of the free version is that you cannot use plugins. If you do not connect them, then everything, in principle, works. The only thing is, yes, there are no beautiful shadows and other high-end features. But everything works. Probably depends on what exactly to call a simple game.

iFart, for example?

Well, let’s say iFart can be done with both the free version and the paid one. I’ve seen really cool games that are made on the free version of Unity. In this regard, it is interesting, first of all, for indie teams. I’ll explain why. When you’re just starting to develop a game, you don’t know yet whether you’ll succeed or not. And to get the money, you need a working prototype of the game. You sit down with a team, often assembled from friends, and rivet this project on Saturdays or Tuesday evenings. By the way, the free version supports version control, that is, you can do one project with five, six, ten. And when this prototype takes on some form in which it can be shown to an investor, a rich neighbor and someone else, after collecting money, you can release it on Android, iPhone or flash.

That is, would you recommend Unity to young developers who are just starting out? Will they be able to figure it out without any problems?

Yes, practice shows that Unity is the easiest thing for them to deal with. They do not need to study the features of hardware, platforms, do not need to think about what is supported in which Android version and what is not supported, and what screen resolution is in this or that phone. We have already done most of the difficult work for the developers. Thus, Unity solves a lot of problems. 

What is the advantage of Unity over other mobile game development engines? Let’s try to compare Unity with Cocos 2D and Marmalade.

First, our engine is not tailored to one specific case, it is quite versatile. Second, you see what you are developing. This chip means a lot. The game is immediately visible in the window, there is an editor, due to which you can work much faster. You don’t need to imagine how it will all look, you don’t need a device. 

That is, it turns out, very good visibility, it is immediately clear what you are doing?

How to say, in Visual Studio, it is also immediately visible what you are doing. The question is that it is the final result that is immediately visible in Unity. That is, not what you are doing, but the final version. And this is very important, because the game consists of many elements. And it’s one thing to see exactly what your little piece looks like, but it’s another thing to see how the whole game looks like, including your little piece. It is important.

Can you name something else offhand?

In fact, everything else is also our advantage. Good team, connections. No, I’m kidding, of course, but ideally, the advantage depends, firstly, on the type of game you’re making, and secondly, on the platform.

But if you fantasize: for which game and on which platform will Unity be ideal?

To do this, you need to keep asking yourself questions. I’m not trying to evade the answer, we’re just trying to be universal. This is both an advantage and a problem. The advantage is that once you pay, conditionally, 3 thousand dollars for the pro version, you can make games of any type: casual, social, and MMO, and anything, both 2D and 3D. Then you can transfer it to mobile platforms, flash, console, and so on.

The code that is written inside Unity is the one that you don’t connect through plugins, and the one that you write yourself and can compile yourself, Unity can translate into a language that is understandable to another platform. That is, say, such a case: a game for iOS written in Unity can be instantly transferred to Android, because it is converted to a format understandable by Android. And that’s it. In order for the game to start, you don’t need to do anything else. Of course, there are caveats here: like “it starts” and “it works well” are different things. But the fact is that an iOS game made on Unity will easily launch on Android and will work.

There is an opinion that Unity is too heavy an engine for two-dimensional games. Is it true or not?

To be honest, the only problem with Unity is that there is no 2D framework in the standard delivery. That is, it does not help in the development of 2D games. He does not help, and does not interfere. This means that for a 2D artist, naked Unity is just a renderer, and sprites and other necessary engines for 2D need to be written yourself, well, or look for someone else’s free ones, or buy.

About the severity. A bare Unity player, aka runtime, takes, depending on the settings, an average of 5-7 MB of memory. Is it hard or not? I think that a basic 2D game, if you write it, for example, on the Android API, can fit in 2 MB. And we only have a runtime of 7 MB. Of course, if we consider more complex games, then this figure will be more than 2 MB. But that’s not the point. The main value of Unity is that it saves time. That is, if the game is not being made for the purpose of becoming the smallest or 2D, but there is a desire to quickly get a product that can top the tops and become successful, which means there is a need to port it to other platforms – then you should use Unity. And if anyone is interested in playing, writing their own renderer, suffering from platform bugs when the game works on one iPhone, but not on the other, one Android is buggy, crashes, then please. And in Unity, we are trying to solve everything from our side.

And, yes, we work directly with platform manufacturers. At the same time, if we say that we have a partnership with Apple, it means that it is the developers who communicate with each other. What is the advantage? It is logical that in this way faster communication is carried out. But the main thing is that the right people hear the right questions and get the right answers. The problem with the manufacturer of the future cool device is solved instantly. This means that we have an entrance to the right doors to solve the right issues extremely quickly.

Recently there was information that Unity will support Wii U.

Moreover, Unity is the main game development environment for Wii U. And this tool will be distributed through the Nintendo channel.

And how difficult or simple will it be for developers to port their mobile games made on Unity to Wii U?

The Unity editor, which will be able to port to Wii U, will be in a separate version. That is, let’s say, in Unity Pro, a developer has purchased iOS, he buys another Android. After that, the Deploy to Android button immediately becomes active. The Wii U version will have only one Deploy to Wii U button. This means that there will be a separate editor for it, distributed, as I said, by the Nintendo channel. It will open Unity projects. That is, it will be possible to open your project for iPhone or Android and convert it to Wii U. And vice versa.

Will you support other consoles? Here’s Ouya you already support, but anything else?

Yes, we support Ouya. Now the guys are working with Union – this is our publishing division. When the hardware already appears, it will be possible to talk about its software support. In the meantime, as everyone knows, the guys have good ideas and a lot of money for their implementation. As for the support. This word is meaningful. You can support morally, but you can physically.

In general, everything is fine. Does Unity have any disadvantages?

There is. Everything has flaws. Unity was not created by the gods.

Well, the secret of creating Unity has been revealed!

(laughing)

Unity was made by a couple of smart guys, after a while a couple more were added to them. And now there are 203 of us in total. This is if we take into account all our developers, sales managers, marketers. All over the world, in all offices: in Seoul, Shanghai, Tokyo, Seattle, San Francisco, Stockholm and Copenhagen – there are 203 of us. 

But we talked about the disadvantages.

If you suddenly don’t remember, I can tell you from Wikipedia.

By the way, let’s read it out, I’ll be happy to comment.

In the Russian Wikipedia there is such a column: advantages / disadvantages. There are two disadvantages, one of which is very funny. It is written that Unity does not support Symbian 3 and Windows Mobile. It seems that this is the worst flaw that can only be.

Yes. But the problem is that we support.

Do you support it? You see, Wikipedia doesn’t know.

Maybe Wikipedia didn’t read our announcements? The trick is that there were initiatives on the part of Nokia (it was many years ago, when Nokia was big, and Apple was very small) to support gaming projects, including Unity on Symbian. We had prototypes that worked and could be ported to. But the problem was that inside Nokia, many simply could not agree among themselves. They were kind of building the Tower of Babel and they were constantly failing at something. Therefore, we, in turn, did not show much interest on our part, because we had an approximate idea of what was going on there.

But Nokia has brought one of the initiatives to an end. Through Union, you can subscribe to their Meego.

Do you support Windows 8?

Both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8.

And who does Russia work for you?

Russia? The question is quite philosophical. What does it mean to engage in Russia? That is, to conquer? It depends on what to conquer: sales, support, marketing, what? Developers and users are sitting in Russia, they also want to make games, and in this regard they are no different from the Chinese, Americans, or anyone else.

Maybe, indeed, there are some features of users?

I don’t even know. Let’s say if you look at the graph, Moscow is the seventh in terms of the number of Unity users. In Moscow, we have only about one percent of all users – on a global scale, this is decent.

And Peter? Don’t they use Unity in St. Petersburg?

And there are indie developers in St. Petersburg. I recently told a major investor that everything is very cool in St. Petersburg in this regard. Yes, there are big offices in Moscow, a lot of money, boring production, working conditions are such that, to put it mildly, they seem strange to me, as a European person. And in St. Petersburg, people are doing really interesting projects, doing something cool, what is commonly called the word “innovation”. So, innovations are born in St. Petersburg. At least in terms of game development. Which is very close to me personally.

Do you help developers in any way? Can they count on your help?

Yes.

That is, if a developer decides to use Unity, then he writes to you, and you help him, answer his questions?

Yes and no. It depends on what it is about. If you hope that after buying Unity, someone will make the game for you, then this is not the case at all. But if you think that something is not working in the engine itself, then of course we will solve the problem. In addition, we have a huge popular forum with hundreds of thousands of users, where developers communicate and help each other.

A kind of community?

Yes, the so-called ecosystem around Unity, which is quite developed, which is important for both indie and large teams.

Here, for example, is one of the most interesting features: Asset Store is our store where you can buy various elements for the game. Let’s imagine that there is an artist in the team who receives conditionally 2-3 thousand dollars a month, that is, one of his working days, approximately costs about 300 dollars. He will draw, for example, some model of a car, well, let it take half a day, in total it will cost $ 150. And so, in the Asset Store you can buy a car, a tree, a wardrobe and much more for 5-10 dollars. How much money can you save? Yes, the same tree, the same car may appear in another game, including competitors. But there are hundreds of thousands of assets in the game, and if one tree or any other element matches, then it will be ignored against the general background.

As for the scripts. Buying them may not completely solve your problem, but if you use them to solve it by 30%, then developers based on a ready-made script will be able to write a solution much faster that is 100% suitable for current tasks. That is, it is easier to write not from scratch for some complex system, but to pay $ 50 and add, conditionally, half. Even if everything is 70%, it will still be much faster. As a result, you can speed up the development process with minimal amounts and save money at the same time.

Do you provide any marketing support for Unity projects?

We have a gallery where we post games, a newsletter where we brag about projects that we liked. And if you ask us to promote a good project, then we will promote it for free. For this, there is Facebook, Twitter and, most interestingly, there is Union. These are guys who have a catalog of games, contracts are signed with them, after which they add your game to their catalog and sell the project, for example, to manufacturers of televisions, new platforms, including Ouya, which we already talked about today, Blackberry, Nokia, to some Chinese app stores, where the entry threshold is very high.

But publishing or PR of any game is not our main task. Yes, we communicate a lot with the same Google, which often asks which game to make. Of course, we share our personal considerations, which is not a marketing tool. That’s why Google is contacting us with this question. We honestly answer what games we like: this game will be released soon, it was played, for this credit, here is the contact of these guys. And you can’t order such a recommendation from us.

But it really makes sense to write to us and tell us about yourself. It may turn out to be a letter to nowhere, because we really get a lot of letters, or it may shoot.

How do you plan to develop? Maybe you have some grandiose plans to take over the universe?

Yes, we are thinking of taking over the universe, why not :)

But there is no concrete plan yet?

In fact, there are key points where we frankly feel weak, and now we are solving these issues. One of them is 2D and GUI. And we have already told you exactly how we solve these issues. This is already at the stage of an almost finished prototype.

In general, one of the main features that Unity is loved for is multiplatform. Whether to add new platforms – of course, only if they are good. If the Web GL standard appears and it fires, why not create Unity Web GL. And suddenly all the previous games that were made on Unity can be immediately ported to Web GL without any problems. Well, or let’s say the new Ouya will fire – and Unity has already made a port. To put it simply, we want to help developers make money without any huge effort on their part. If a new promising platform appears, it is not necessary to make a new game for it, you can easily port an existing one using Unity.

So we try to be closer to the developers – listen to them, take into account their opinions. Even if it costs us money. A huge number of people trust us, and all this unspoiled karma is much more important than anything.