Official Introducing Gigaya: Unity's upcoming sample game

Congrats, been looking forward to something like this for a long, long time! From the blog post:

Personally, I'd welcome the competition. While I think it's great to release both a free playable and the source project, and appreciate that Unity already communicates with studios directly, I still believe the more you directly depend on the engine the better. To me, that means owning multiple products that live and die like the rest of us

That being said, love this. Congrats again and happy dogfooding Unity team!

 

Could you add the game page to Steam so that we could already wishlist the game?

 

What would that accomplish?

 

Wishlists are actually a reasonably big deal for the steam scene, as conversion ratio is above 0 on launch

 

Is this going to be to sold? Why do we care about its conversion ratio?

 

The numbers on the wishlist allow to estimate the popularity of a game before it's released. Either Hippo meant that (estimating potential interest) or he just made a joke and you didn't catch it.

 

And we care about its popularity because……?

Anyway, never mind. We’re getting off topic.

 

For example, wishlisters will be notified when the game will be out. They don't necessarily need to be following Unity forums or blog.

 

It's superb! And a great test for future optimisation on the engine. I would hate to see workarounds because that entirely defeats the point of dog fooding the engine itself and processes

 

You mention Steam. How about consoles? Those are harder to release for and Unity presents some significant challenges for them.

 

And Mobile AppStore and GooglePlay for low end devices

 

This one looks cool. Well done

 

Currently we don't have plans for this to be targeted at mobile (iOS and Android) devices. This is mostly due to the design, controls and scale of the game.

 

In other word, screw the mobile devs again.

 

Scale of the game? It's smaller than genshin impact on mobile .

Probably something you should consider, as retrofitting game into unplanned low end platform is a common things real dev have to deal with, on top of budget pressure you probably don't have.

BTW what's the targeted specs of that demo? What's the minimal specs? It's not really dogfeeding if you have unlimited hardware budget, since part of a real dev workflow is to deal with the annoyance of fitting into a target spec, and tools can break or mask what's needed. Fortunately profiler tool are good in unity.

 

Apart from the playable characters, Genshin Impact is actually very low poly (and the poly count is not particularly high with them either.). maybe you don't notice that so quickly because of the well implemented anime style. The world isn't so big that floating point accuracy would be a problem (Liyue is in a separate scene) As far as I've seen, Gaaya is much more detailed.

 

Low end Mobile can render 2 000 000 ply in frame (500 000 is easy even without optimisations) but Unity most of the time can not feed gpu in performant way with such amount of objects.

So middle mobile can render I think about 5 000 000 poly. Dont know how match gigaya cost per frame but think it is really important to fit it on mobile. At least middle ones.

 

Please don't take us choosing not to do mobile this project as an 'attack'! Just for the type of game genre we wanted to tackle (Ratchet & Clank, Mario, Crash Bandicoot, Banjo Kazooie, Psychonauts, It Takes Two, etc) we felt that mobile wasn't a viable platform in terms of controls, game type and performance. But we have discussed how we could tackle mobile in the future on a more suitable project. For example; Crash Bandicoot and Rocket League adapted their game genre/controls/style entirely to fit mobile platform; maybe this is a route we would take. (Im not committing us to anything here; just being open with our decision)

Genshin Impact art style means it can get away with alot of visual tricks for it to run on mobile. Its also less of a 'layered' world than Gigaya (Which is smaller but more dense in detail, IMO)

We are not working to an unlimited hardware budget; ill ask if I can share the PC target spec.

 

Genshin Impact was done by a team of over 400 people, some of which probably perished during the grueling process of making a large open world that runs on mobile in (a heavily modified) Unity.

It really should not be used as a benchmark of what's possible by the average developer with stock Unity. It's one of those exceptions that make the rule, like the Ori games.

It's one of those games that was made "Despite Unity".

 

I haven't actually played Genshin but looking at mobile footage it definitely benefits from being fairly basic lit (single directional light) and anime toon characters (That look unlit? Im just waiting for Neoshaman to tell me im wrong). It still is very impressive!

 

Please think about releasing it to Nintendo Switch.
It will be good candidate similar to middle mobile device and it has good analog controls to work with

 

It's already considered i think

 

It's not the important point really, but if you want to geek out on that type of rendering they made a breakdown at a UNITE events for their previous game and there is another one at the lastest GDC

Spoiler: anime style rendering of mihoyo

It's a been more involving than "unlit" "not unlit"

First I want to apologize because I sweared to stay away from that thread and the over one (I even deleted all my post) but here I am as the fraking nerd I'm always be ...

My problem is much more fundamental that the thing I use for illustration purpose, i'm not sure it's my place to criticize this problem I feel like it's an oversight and lack of vision of management and not you. And I'll inevitably draw comparison to unreal, and I'm pretty sure people will pick apart the details and not discussed the broader point I'm actually bringing, that is the lack of direction of the project RELATIVE to the stated goal of dog feeding unity. It's like you randomly choose a game to do (the one that please you collectively as a team) instead of the one that is sure to demonstrate many pain point of unity, ie I'm having a problem with the "planning", basically goal -> requirement -> constraint -> solution, in your case it looks random, even though some feature are cool (path finding for flying agents using invisible mesh), but some are pure fluff that need a trim down as they are distraction from the goal.

And since unreal released two technical talk about their own demo, the difference of approach (make a demo game that show case feature and limits with a small team) is even more jarring (they basically detail the process of the design from the stated goal of showcasing a product, and they did it very efficiently). It's like Gigaya just handwave the challenge (we can't please anyone) and didn't thought through the feature relative to the stated goal. Case in point, the solution of the artist about hand and slope is very clever, BUT using the IK rig of unity align with the idea of dog fooding, so implementing both and contrasting would have been an optimal solution (ie dog fooding while showing a simpler alternative as a way to teach about game dev), instead we have simple avoidance of a unity feature, which in the hand don't serve the goal of the demo.

My point with genshin isn't how it looks, but how they planned for a visual that actually scale across platform (dog fooding porting to multi platform, which is its own pain point) while still looking good, it's not unlit, it's a custom shader (dog fooding shader graph and dog fooding custom light), obviously you can't make genshin that's not the point, it's the planning of the project.

NERDING OFF

If I come back ranting, just boot me off, I have nothing more to add, I just need to get out and touch grass by that point. I should just care about finishing my project really, not complain on forums. Especially I don't think anyone is interested in that specific subject, it's too bureaucratic lol.

 

Not every game has to be ported to every single platform.
PS5 and Mobile are just different worlds.
We don't expect Spider Man: Miles Morales (one of the PS5 presentation games) to be ported to mobile either without a full rework in another engine (what's currently happening) for example. Gigaya's visual design is closer to that one than to Genshin impact.

An Unity original project with mobile capability would surely be welcome, but it'd likely only make sense with an inherently different approach than Gigaya (and then you'd doubt how much sense it makes to run that one on PC/current gen consoles because it would not be a great showcase of the Quality achievable with Unity on those platforms).

Small studios should be careful to not "spread themselves too thin" by trying to launch on everything as well...
Sure it'd be a wonderful world if Unity or any engine would make such porting super easy but that kinda remains a dream for many reasons.

 

This is an amazing idea. Can't wait to see how this is built.

But the name, who come up with this name? gigaya? can't even pronounce it right. What is this? Maybe find some other name?

 

Who said anything about an 'attack'? More like complete and total neglect in every pipeline, in shader graph, in shaders, pretty much every aspect of Unity over the last few years has completely and totally ignored the mobile game devs. All I'm saying is this is par the course for unity.

As far as the project not being a "fit" for mobile, this is something I can believe. Why? Because unity has basically stripped out everything it had that was good to mobile, and show no desire to implement them in URP at all. Unity making a project for mobile would require Unity to admit it simply doesn't provide the proper tools.

It just completely boggles my mind that mobile is always last priority (sometimes less than last, just plain never), given how the mobile game market is growing, and is expected to continue to grow. URP has left gaps in every single area that would benefit mobile, to the point of being a joke. Many devs are reverting back to built-in (which is better to mobile, but still not great) due to the missing features that should be no brainers (Simple Lit Shader Graph, anyone?). Or even moving to Unreal Engine, where at least exists the tools to do mobile correctly. This is where I am as of now.

 

@Andy-Touch For the future mobile sample game project, I would like u to have near to triple A quality networking mobile sample game project that push over the limit of Unity in terms of both CPU and GPU that able to build super high performance mobile runtime to support wide range of Android and iOS mobile devices. The mobile sample game project will stress test and figure out how to try fit in highest graphics quality (Try to chase desktop pc graphics) and complex simulation (Like a lots of units simulation which is really hard at mobile platform). For graphics, the project will use to stress test and push over the limit of URP for mobile platforms. The project will also try to solve the problem of to build a single mobile runtime that able to have universal graphics quality setting from lowest to highest to support wide range of Android and iOS mobile devices without having to deploy multiple different mobile runtime builds just to support different graphics settings. The project will also use to fix and improve what URP is lacking and blocking the development of the project.

For networking, the project will also use to stress test official Unity networking solution to make sure Unity netcode is as highest performance as possible. I would like Unity netcode to reach esport level netcode quality. The project will also use to fix and improve what Unity netcode is lacking and blocking the development of the project.

One more thing can do for on this project is to battle test and stress test all the new unity features like new input system, ui toolkit runtime, ui toolkit editor, addressables and so on.

 

So u mean something like COD mobile but with default unity editor???

 

Ya but I believe there's Unity mobile game projects that is much more ambitious than COD mobile. Currently the most ambitious mobile game project that I know is Genshin Impact. I believe it's definitely not going to be able to achieve with the current default vanilla Unity. Currently just the high performance open world feature for both mobile and pc platform is not available yet. I want Unity to push their game engine until the quality that the real production game studio is actually using.

Edit: Actually I dun really expect Unity to come out the game sample that has full complete gameplay but some portion of it that is enough to battle test all the features of Unity game engine and push it to over the limit to make sure it's really working at real production environment. As long as they found something they needs hack or workaround then it's something needs to improve and fix at default vanilla Unity game engine.

 

you can't compare Genshin Impact with normal vanilla unity. They most likely are using a customized version of the engine.

 

And is the version of it released in Florida called Gia?

 

I always hear a lot of awesome Unity games using customized version of the engine. It's not really nice and this has to change. This also means that there's still a lot of gaps that default vanilla unity has to fill.

 

there is nothing bad in doing this. is a product that big studio buy from unity to customize the engine for what they need. is one of the way unity makes money.

 

Not change, transformation. You want to transform your data using DOTS. I've been digging deep and it's pretty clear to me where Unity's headed. I like it a lot. I'll go on record saying it's the sort of thing that could manage/render an Assassins Creed (or similar) game eventually. With the right budget.

 

What really bothers me though was the promise from Unity that URP would have all the features of built-in, plus extra. What they delivered was a bare minimum, and told us to implement it ourself using undocumented, unknown code and internal APIs that change with the breeze and are 1,000,000x more complex than before. That, or "buy this product from the store" to fill the intentional gap, which makes them a % cut.

I'm fine with Unity making money - It needs to. What I'm not fine with is doing it so underhandedly by stripping out functionality and basically lying to us about it. They have completely and totally lost my trust.
I put it off for as long as I could, but I'm experimenting with a switch to Unreal as we speak. We'll see.

Not that I expect Unity to care. They don't. Since going public they need to turn a profit, and they intend to do so through services (eg. Weta Digital tools buyout + others). They no longer have much incentive to listen or care about game devs. It is a sad state.

What they may underestimate though is how their reputation is, and will be, tarnished.

 

Check out this for URP example: https://www.ea.com/games/lost-in-random
(current state of URP: https://unity.com/roadmap/unity-platform/rendering-visual-effects)

It's not *too* bad

 

Haha. URP is fine if you aren't optimizing for mobile. Otherwise it indeed lacks in many areas.
Thank you for the links though. Always appreciate your input.

From a business standing, especially after an IPO, Unity's direction makes sense. It is just sad to me personally since it feels like a loss for gaming. I hope I'm proven wrong.

I still stand by the trust issue though. I know I'm not alone in this either. It will be hard for Unity to change that for me at this point. I just hope it takes the brand trust issue more seriously.

Strangely, even though Unity lost my trust I'm still, oddly, rooting for Unity to succeed.

 

...on topic of this free sample project...

That's cool. Good work.

 

New video up! Gives a little more of an overview of some core systems and elements of the game.

 

Any chance for an update on the status of the project now that a certain recent event has occurred?

 

Deleted a couple of posts. Keep on topic. Unity is asked to respond with a public message concerning Gigaya by @Ryiah so we are only accepting non-staff and non-business related questions.

 

Well, is it safe to say it's not happening?
It's been over 10 days, with no announcement about the project at all.
I guess another way of doing PR is not communicating at all when you know you dropped the ball, eventually it'll be forgotten, that's the aim I imagine.

Also the discussion thread is still closed, will it forever be closed because unity refuses to make an announcement? only helps their strategy.

 

I think enough time has passed for staff response and therefore I will no longer moderate replies in this thread.

That's fair on unity and community. will not block any responses.

 

The only thing I can say is that the Internal Games Production Team (of which I was a part of) working on Gigaya (and various other things like Starter Assets) is no longer at Unity.

(Disclaimer: this is not an official response or announcement; just me posting as an individual.)

 

Probably their way of dealing with it is to say nothing at all. No response means no news so that the topic will die on its own. Those who are unhappy will get tired of it and move on. Occasionally someone will bring it up but without much impact.

I only have a few posts here, but I have been using unity since 2014. Thanks for everything you have done. It's ridiculous that you got laid off.

 

well if they no longer working on the game they can't answer my question.

hippocoder stp deleting my post or at least send me an explanation in private why you delete the posts. this is how you create a toxic community if you do stuff not explaining and not motivated.

I've just asked if they had technical issues with the project. deleting my posts just confirms that unity team knows about the issue and they are trying to bury it under the proverbial rug