Hand’s demonstration on making cross platform games with Unity, Part 1
Time: 9:30am – 10:20am
Speaker: Carl Callewaert

A hands-on demonstration of the development of a multiplatform game starting with prototyping the game to the final version running on Android, iOS, the web, Facebook and as a standalone app. The steps include but are not limited to: programming, art assets import and updating, particles, GUI, AI and building for multiplatform deployment.

Hand’s demonstration on making cross platform games with Unity: Part 2
Time: 10:50am – 11:40am
Speaker: Carl Callewaert

A hands-on demonstration of the development of a multiplatform game starting with prototyping the game to the final version running on Android, iOS, the web, Facebook and as a standalone app. In this part more advanced topics will be covered.

Performance optimization tips and tricks for Unity
Time: 12:40pm – 1:30pm
Speaker: Jonas Echterhoff

This session will demonstrate optimization techniques on a sample Unity project, show how to use the Unity profiler to find performance bottlenecks, and will show some common pitfalls to avoid for optimal performance in Unity projects.

Shader Authoring in Unity
Time: 2:00pm –   2:50pm
Speaker: Shawn White

It’s difficult to make a game today without writing at least one shader. Whether you’re indie, mainstream, or somewhere in the middle, having the ability to write your own shaders will give you what you need to make your game POP! Unity provides a suite of built-in shaders to get you started, but in this talk we’ll get you up to speed on what you need to know about writing your very own shaders in Unity.

Being Social: How Games Can Leverage Facebook on the Road to Success
Time: 3:20pm –   4:10pm
Speaker: Tom Higgins

The explosive growth of social networking is changing the ways in which people of every type interact with each other in some incredible ways. That’s easy to say but it takes a bit more effort to properly understand. What are those changes? Are they limited to those creating browser-based content or do they extend to the desktop and mobile apps as well? And most importantly, how can you and your team take advantage of them in your games? This presentation will discuss some of the most prominent questions facing developers targeting social networking sites and describe how developers can put that information to use right away. The discussion will focus on Facebook and the Unity game engine in particular as they offer developers unique opportunities for success. But in the end the strategies that will be shared can easily be applied anywhere, regardless of what social networking site or game engine is being used. Developers of all types can attend this session and learn how to incorporate social networking features into their own efforts, from the early design phases all the way through to release, giving themselves a much greater chance of success.

Using and publishing content and extensions on the Unity Asset Store
Time: 4:40pm –   5:30pm
Speaker: Tom Higgins

This session will start with an introduction to the Asset Store, showing what is available and demonstrate how to search for and use content in your own projects. After that he will go through how to submit your own content and extensions to the store, how it should be formatted and go through common mistakes to avoid and other hints for speeding up the submission process.

Distribution with Union
Time: 5:40pm –   6:30pm
Speaker: Brian Bruning

There’s never been a better time to be a game developer.  Huge audiences are now reachable without the aid of publishers or retail outlets.  But what are the odds of getting noticed out there today in the new digital landscape?  What tactics are most effective?  What should you be doing to get noticed and find customers?

Studio Workshops

Monday, August 8th
10:40am- 12:10pm Joe Robins “Creating a Multi-platform, Real-time Portfolio for Your Artwork”
3:45pm- 5:15pm Aras Pranckevicius and Renaldas Zioma “How to Write Fast iPhone and Android Shaders in Unity”

Studio Talks

Monday, August 8th
12pm-1pm Roald Hoyer-Hansen “Creating a Cool Game Without a Programmer”

Tuesday, August 9th
10:30am- 11:30am Kuba Cupisz and Ole Ciliox “Special Effects with Depth”

Thursday, August 11th
10:30am- 12pm Robert Cupisz and Kaspar Daugaard “Lighting Worlds in Unity”

Thanks to everyone who came by our booth; you helped to make this our best GDC yet! Our booth drew a crowd from the time the doors opened until they closed every day of the expo. Lots of people wanted to get a sneak peak at some of the recently announced Unity 3 features as well as get hands on demonstrations of Unity’s elegant interface and efficient workflow. There was also a bunch of playable Unity content running on iPhones, web browsers, an in-development Broadcom chipset, a Wii, a 360, and a giant multi-touch table!

There was Unity stuff going on outside of our booth too, including sessions, presentations, and sponsorships.

Photos:

A set of photos that shows off our booth elements, a set that shows how busy the booth was, and some artsy shots of some Unity employees.

Sessions:

Autodesk has posted a video of Adam Mechtley (of Touch K.O. and Flashbang fame) speaking about Maya, Motionbuilder, and Unity iPhone workflow and optimizations.

Tom Higgin’s iPhone Summit session: Fastest Path from Concept to Top Paid got a write-up in TUAW and in Japanese in Inside Games.

I wasn’t able to find a write-up of the GDC Session: Unity for people who know what they’re doing, but I hear that it was really well attended.

Congratulations:

Congratulations to all of the Winners and Finalists of the IGF who won a copy of Unity Pro! (Something we did as part of our IGF Gold Sponsorship.)

Also, congratulations to the creators of Guerrilla Bob and Tumbledrop, two Unity iPhone games which were finalists in the IGF Mobile contest.

And a huge Congrats to Press Play — their PC/Mac/Web/Wii game Max and the Magic Marker won the D2D Vision Award!

Lastly, congratulations to Nathan Hansen; winner of the drawing we had at our booth for a free license of Unity Pro, and to Jeremy Sprague who won a copy of Unity iPhone in the post-show Conference Associates raffle!

Booth

Come by our booth this year and get your badge swiped for a chance to win a license of Unity Pro or Unity iPhone! Our booth is 1,000 square feet (that’s 2.5x larger than last year!) and it is made out of wood, yes wood, and was designed by our friends at Because We Can who are pretty notable in the San Francisco area for doing the offices of game companies like Three Rings, Backbone, and Cryptic. The booth number is 1112, but it’s at the front of the expo hall so you definitely won’t miss it!

The main focus of our booth is to give attendees a hands on experience. To do that we’re going to have three demo machines for giving people a tour of Unity and features they can be looking forward to and we’ve got three demo machines to show off the just-released Unity iPhone 1.6. We’ll also have lots of great Unity content that people can get their hands on including: an iPhone arcade with four iPod Touches containing the very best Unity iPhone games, a Wii playing the award winning Max and the Magic Marker, a Xbox 360 showing Interstellar Marines, a web arcade showing a variety of Unity web player games, and a FishTish multi-touch table showing off uniTUIO content.

We’ll also be presenting in our booth’s theater and joined by the partners from our Partner Pavilion as well as the uniTUIO guys and Autodesk.

Schedule

Tuesday

Fastest Path from Concept to Top Paid

iPhone Summit, Room 306, 12:30-1:00pm

Tom Higgins, Product Evangelist at Unity Technologies talks about Unity iPhone and why it’s become the dominant middleware solution for content published in the App Store. The presentation will include an overview of the tool and its feature set, the development workflow and a sampling of success stories to highlight what’s possible with the amazing Unity game engine.

iPhone Summit Mixer, Sponsored by Unity Technologies

5:30pm-7:30pm near the iPhone summit room at the back of the hallway

Wednesday

Myspace Tutorial Day: Unity on Myspace

Room 300, South Hall, 10:30-11:00am

Featuring Tom Higgins and A few folks from Cmune who will talk about their experience creating social games with Unity for social platforms like Myspace.

GamesBeat@GDC

Room 305, South Hall, 2:15-3:00pm

Our CEO David Helgason will participate in a pannel on Disruptive Innovation

OpenFeint Party

8:30-12:30

We’re the drink sponsor at the OpenFeint party

Thursday

Expo floor opens.

IGF/Game Developers Choice Awards

North Hall, Hall D, 6:30pm

Friday

Session: Intro to Unity for People Who Know What They’re Doing

Room 121, North Hall, 9:00-10:00am

Unity’s Lucas Meijer will give a technical demonstration of Unity’s featureset. He will be joined by Unity’s CTO Joachim Ante, lead graphics engineer Aras Pranckevicius, and technical artist Joe Robins. C++ / C# scripting integration, shader programming, asset pipeline and iphone publishing workflow are among the topics that will be discussed. A must attend session for anyone evaluating engines for their next game.

Expo-only pass holders welcome!

Unity for Engineers

Expo Hall, NVIDIA Booth, 12:00-1:00pm

Saturday

Last day of the show, come by the booth one last time to hear a session you missed or to say goodbye!