How Unity 3D Became A Best Game Development Engine?
In the early 2000s, three young programmers without much money gathered in a basement and started coding what would become one of the most widely used pieces of software in the video game industry.
“Nobody really remembers how we survived in that period except we probably didn’t eat much,” said David Helgason, the CEO, and co-founder of Unity game development Technologies, maker of the Unity 3D game engine.
A decade later, untold numbers of developers have used Unity3D to make thousands of video games for mobile devices, consoles, browsers, PCs, Macs, and even Linux. The existence of Unity3D and similar products (such as the Unreal Engine and CryEngine) helped democratize game development, making the kinds of tools used by the world’s largest mobile game development companies available to the unity game developers at little or no cost. This has helped developers focus less on creating an amazing video game’s underlying technology and more on the artistic and creative processes that actually make games fun to play.
Helgason explained that a game engine is “a toolset used to build video games and it’s the technology that executes the graphics, the audio, the physics, the interactions, the networking. Everything you see and hear on the screen is powered by this code that has to be super-optimized because it’s moving so much data and throwing so many pixels on the screen.”
At one point in time, he added, every mobile game development company in the world had its own proprietary technology — which made a lot of sense in a more constrained world where device memory was low by today’s standards. Game engines, in their natural state, were little more than minimal scaffolding around a particular game. But that eventually changed. “As platforms became more complicated, the technology requirements for making games became more complicated,” he said. “At some point, you needed different shadows and special effects and smoke and particles and physics has to be realistic, and all this stuff.”
Instead of requiring separate software products for major development aspects such as animation, physics, rendering, artificial intelligence, sound, and so on, engines such as Unity3D give game developers just about everything they need to build games in one package. Unity3D’s Pro edition is $1,500 per user; there’s also a free version with less functionality, but can still be used to build and sell games.
“We Were Just Hackers and We Just Liked Our Macs”
A decade ago, when Helgason joined with colleagues Joachim Ante and Nicholas Francis in Denmark to work on their project, they wanted to make something in the image of Apple’s Final Cut Pro. Final Cut gives amateur filmmakers reasonably priced, professional filmmaking tools; Unity would do the same for video game developers.
But the trio lacked a solid business plan. “The ridiculous and bizarre thing was literally the first and only platform we supported in the very first months was the Mac,” said Helgason, who is now based in San Francisco. This was before Mac’s resurgence, and Mac’s place in the gaming industry (especially compared to Windows) was even punier than it is today.
“It was the worst possible choice we could make from a business perspective, but we were just hackers and we just liked our Macs,” he said. “We weren’t thinking big thoughts from a business perspective.”
The three survived on loans, occasional consulting projects, and some non-technical jobs. “I did some cafe work in the evenings, mainly for the free food because it didn’t pay much,” Helgason said. “We were all in, we didn’t have any other projects we were doing.”
A somewhat primitive version of Unity was released in 2005. The team added support for Windows PCs and Web browsers early on. By 2008, the engine had become more sophisticated and software sales were paying the bills, allowing Unity to expand to a dozen or so employees.
A turning point came in mid-2008 when Apple unveiled the iPhone App Store. “We rushed and managed to support the iPhone, the first game engine to do that in late 2008,” Helgason said. “It happened really quickly. Suddenly, a lot of people wanted Unity.”
Another big advance came in 2008 when the Cartoon Network used Unity3D games to create FusionFall, an MMORPG for kids that’s been played by 8 million people. Electronic Arts used Unity3D in 2009 to make Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online, and even Microsoft and Ubisoft became customers. In 2011, Unity bought an animation company called Mecanim, boosting the game engine’s underlying technology.
Today, Unity game development company and its 285 employees around the world support development for iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, Web browsers, PS3, Xbox 360, and the Wii U. Unity is planning to support Sony’s PlayStation Vita but hasn’t decided yet whether to support the Nintendo 3DS. Windows Phone and BlackBerry support are in the works. Some 1.8 million developers use Unity; the software’s browser plugin has been installed more than 200 million times. Dead Trigger and the upcoming Dead Trigger 2.
