UNITE 2014: Lessons and Observations

Last week was very productively spent at Unite 2014 learning about all things Unity.

In case you are not into game development, Unity claims to be used by over a million game developers around the world. While I rather suspect those statistics are up their with Second Life and Twitter counting everyone who ever signed up for an account, there is no denying that one whole hell of a lot of people use Unity for game development, including us. I have to say all of my major objectives in attending were met.

The first thing I wanted to achieve was make a definite decision whether to go with Unity for the 2D game for the iPad that we are going to dive into next month. We have some artwork, a rough design, but we’re coming up on the first point of no return decision. Well, there’s always a return, but if we start with Unity and then switch to solution X it may take us quite a bit of time to re-tool.

The decision was, yes, we definitely want to use Unity. My concerns about performance on lower powered devices were addressed. First, I spoke to some helpful folks from Unity who pointed out that you can set your game’s graphic quality ranging from Fastest through Beautiful to Fantastic. Yeah, those are actually the last two settings. I also attended a session on tips for working with mobile devices that gave me some good ideas, like if we have character that has a sword, instead of having two images, a sword and a character, have that be drawn as one image.

Two other clinchers for unity were

the number of platforms to which we could expand eventually – play station, xbox, android phones, smart TVs. Unity works with all of those. The same would not be true of code we wrote in javascript for the web.( Speaking of javascript, even though Unity supports both C# and javascript, I noted that the examples were overwhelmingly C# ones in the presentations and their seems to be a definite lean in that direction), and

the number of vendors with integrated add-on packages, everything from SpeedTree, which makes drawing trees fascinating to mixamo which offers a much simpler way for making 3-D animated characters. I was so impressed with mixamo that I texted one of our fabulous artists from the presentation, This is something we need to start using, and by we, I mean you, because we both know I suck at art.

The second thing I wanted to achieve was to get more familiar with Unity. That was achieved. I was able to follow the examples in the Training Day and do the Nightmares game, which was pretty fun. The next couple of days, in my spare time, I made another much simpler game from scratch for my grandchildren to play. It won’t win any awards for originality or anything else, but my Unity knowledge definitely spiked up in a week.

One reason I insist on going to events like this, even though people tell me that I am the CEO and should be doing CEO things, is that I would never, ever find 40 hours in a week just to learn  if I stayed back in the office. I’ve written before about the Red Queen’s Race in technology, where you need to run as fast as you can to stay in the same place. I turned 56 last week and more opportunities are coming my way than ever before, which I attribute to refusing to equate age with stagnation.

No brogrammer culture in sight

Speaking of age – I usually go to conferences on statistics – the Joint Statistical Meetings, SAS Global Forum, etc. Sometimes I go to start-up events. This was my first game developer conference and I had heard horrid things about the game industry, that women are sexually harassed, assaulted, disrespected.

As far as horrid brogrammer culture – didn’t see it, and I looked. The demographics were overwhelmingly male, somewhere between 90-95%, I would guess. None of the sessions I attended had a female presenter. On the other hand, I didn’t submit a paper. I suggested it to The Invisible Developer and he didn’t want to do it, and I was too busy with everything else. We decided next year, for sure we would co-author one and submit it. Should be fun.

My point is, I don’t  think they received hardly any submissions from women, just based on the number of women attending.

Despite all of the people who claim to have started coding in the womb and how much VCs supposedly drool over twenty-somethings, I saw about as many people under 20 as I did over 60. That’s based on me eye-balling it, I didn’t actually go around carding people. Given the amount of grey hair and balding, I’m going for the crowd was overwhelmingly in their thirties and forties.

While there were far fewer women than at statistics conferences, there were more than the zero African-Americans and Latinos you usually see at statistics events, although it was clear from the eavesdropping during the coffee breaks (I call it qualitative data collection) that many of these folks were actually from Latin America attending the conference. It was FAR more international than SAS Global Forum or JSM, even though both of those have a smattering of international folks.

As far as the whole sexual harassment, mansplaining, unwelcome thing – didn’t see it. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Every single person we met was nice, polite and interested in talking about game development. No one treated me like I was a second-class citizen and the only person who insisted on explaining stuff to me that I already knew was The Invisible Developer, but he has lots of other non-annoying traits that make up for it, so it doesn’t bother me.

It may be that I am old, plus I was there with my husband, so no one would bother me. However, I really did look, whether it was at cocktails in the evening, at lunch, during the coffee breaks, at the young women sitting around me in conference sessions  – and I did not see a single hint of the kind of bad behavior I’ve been hearing about. I’m a small person and at this conference, I was just there to hang out and learn stuff, so I was wearing jeans and a hoodie most days, my point being, there wasn’t any reason people would be on their best behavior around me.

I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. I’m saying I didn’t see it happen here.

All I can say is — you should go to the next Unite conference. Learn stuff about game development and people will be nice to you. What more can you want? Well, if you want more, I should add that Seattle had some awesome restaurants.

If you want to go next year, do jump on it right away when you see it advertised though, because everything sold out – the conference, training day, nearby hotels.