Official Introducing Gigaya: Unity's upcoming sample game

PR has devolved into a song and dance of fake outrage met with fake apologies, because people demand that you talk to them like they're stupid. Why bother?

This just popped up in my YouTube recommended and I had to chuckle:

 

I would hate to see what your PR looks like...

 

Yeah, that's exactly my point. I'm not bullshiting you, I'm just having an honest, direct, human conversation. But people want to be coddeled with wishy washy PC bullshit.

 

I love such optimistic posts, but as a newbie to Unity I passed many confusing steps from choosing pipeline to bashing my head of random code that changes from version to version.
Unity relies heavily on community assets, because many stuff are lacking out of box.

I know looking and working closely with other Unity projects like EFT or Subnautica can show somehow issues, but you have to experience it yourself. Like why Unreal 4 never changed UI menu-icon-layout since launch? Because they know it will be pain to make their own games and putting sticks into wheels for no reason. It just very small detail, but showing it's approach.

That's why Unity should release or keep making Gigaya imo, devs really need to experience all the steps from start to finish.

But biggest bummer for me is 3 render pipelines workflow, like why not make all-in-one solution and improve it gradually, instead hiring more and more people solving problems across all SRPs
And that's why Unreal is more in trend right now, because devs are actually developing their engine for games, not for ads or for single presentation showing feature in preview state which will be abandoned after 0.1 version.

 

Direct human conversation is not PR.

PR is "I have news people will think is bad news but I need them to know it's good news". Not "I have to tell people news".

It's not about PC, it's about understanding your audience and keeping them on your side.

You have to be honest cause people WILL look at the details, but not ignorant of how people will react. You have way more control over how people react to you than you might think. You just need a little foresight, which comes from understanding your users.

Ultimately making them feel less stressed out about whatever you have to say.

These people have no clue what's actually going on and have no reason to understand the details of the decision. It's almost always a mistake to let people draw their own conclusions.

 

Who is Unity trying to make PR for? Some "F***ing idiots" who want smoke blown up their arse? Or discerning developers who want to know their platform will yield a profit? The problem Unity faces is they aren't just some slop produced for some streaming service for mass consumption, they're a tangible tech platform that people actually use and their users need to cut through BS to actually get S*** done.

I feel like we're in the midst of a cultural shift where we are collectively realizing that maybe blowing smoke up each others' asses all the time and playing this song and dance was never very fruitful in the long term. I'm a hopeless optimist though.

Anyway, I'm derailing the thread and not even sure any more WTF we were blathering about.

You're right, PR is about softening everything into something completely uncontroversial for mass consumption so no one gets offended, and I F***ing hate it. You would hate my PR, probably why i've never been tasked with it!

 

Thats not the right takeway, but alright.

 

duh...

 

Totally valid and appreciated - these are services we've used and benefited from in the past. But there's a category of feedback that is difficult if not impossible to fully appreciate without living in a production throughout its lifecycle, start to finish, and then onto the next one. I'm entirely open to the idea you're able to capture some of that, but unconvinced the value provided by an internal productions team isn't worth the cost. As a first attempt it would be narrow, but nothing I saw from that team indicated it would be anything but direct and rich. My sense is that like many things in this industry, it was ultimately axed because it was hard to put a value on it that would fit in a spreadsheet.

Which to me is the real problem. Some in leadership at Unity at one point in time thought that charging $1 for reloading in the middle of a play session was good design. I can empathize with the fact that the F2P revolution was confusing and disruptive for the industry, but to me it seems like not only has that mindset not evolved, it's bled into everything Unity offers. When I go to the products, solutions, or support and services sections of the website it feels like I'm trapped in one of those player sinks I've spent my career trying to avoid, but that Unity now promotes as learning material. All the talk about 'synergy' and 'creators' and you hide tools that are exciting and could meaningfully impact the lives and creativity of your users behind a web of paywalls. You end up missing out on the gems that could be game changers, struggle to make the numbers work, and seem to now be doubling down on that strategy.

1,000%. But it's very unclear given the last few years and recent events how Unity will open things up as meaningfully as the competition has and continues to. No one is perfect, and of course the work is hard and unpredictable, and Unity covers a lot of cases the others don't and that makes it harder. But incentives ultimately drive everything. And when you're not dogfooding and the majority of your success comes when our success is based on ads, it's going to distort incentives.

I hope this doesn't come off as entitled or un-appreciative. You all make a lot of great things I don't personally have the time or talent to do on my own, and that leverage has helped me in more ways than I can list here. DOTS is something I've been looking forward to since before it was even announced (and I've used since the first releases). Ziva could be cool. Weta could be cool. Digital Human could be cool. Package / Asset Store improvements could be cool. You've got so many talented, passionate people making so many cool things that I'd love to support and be a part of. But how am I supposed to have confidence enough to invest in that over other options, given the last few years of trends that more and more seem unlikely to change?

 

As all my previous post this is what I cling onto, DOTS 1.0 resuming all previously paused features, and accelerating the development of core features of the engine. I still have high hopes and believe in Unity's future

Reading your posts feels like reading the old Unity Blog back, I really do miss the transparency, hope, and optimism.
Good luck Unity Team, push forward and fight hard!

 

Yeah the island is unity PR done right, no nonsense answer and thoughtful position relative to opportunity and difficulty. We can not agree, but it's less frustrated.

I have a lot to say about the blind spot of program like accelerate thingy, all I know is that I have friend in healthy indie company, that have multiple success, that are in polite corporate relation with unity, but I know for fact, through these friends, they are raging about unity and have start looking around and some have start polling together a new internal engine (another friend is in charge of it).

But anyway, unity still need to turn a profit and focus on that for while, and at the same time do silently the unity next gen they need DOTS as a foundation. Seems like a lot rest on DOTS being ready.

 

Welp…

 

Wasnt also EA that closed down a lot of studios they bought out ?

 

I mean… it’s just comical at this point. Like the strategy is literally to turn the tools into a player sink. Can’t wait til they get to loss aversion!

 

Seems like they are integrating it closer in their cloud solution, which they allude to in the WETA Unite 2022. Ie finally merging it internally instead of having it dangling around as a mock external services. I expect other acquisition to follow this pattern.

 

I’d really, really like to believe that. But what percentage of their cloud solutions have they nailed thus far? Is it really easier to build a solid, productivity enhancing remote tool than one that runs locally? What will the options be for users who need something that runs locally due to poor internet connections, business requirements, or simply don’t want to keep everything in the cloud? How many uBux will it cost to re-render my maps? I’d LOVE to be wrong but all this leaves me with is more uncertainty.

 

Are you using art engine? what is your use case? Asking for curiosity, I haven't study it yet to see if it's necessary, a time saver and if there isn't alternative.

To me it looks like Unity is trying hard to get a new revenue stream, it hasn't successfully build quality product internally and resorted to acquisition to fill that skill gap. I would say their cloud solution is about providing workflows time saver services to stable midcore company, with enough cash to attract talents, to increase the appeal and dependence to unity's ecosystem (recurrent revenue stream). Therefore they would see people with poor internet connection as a business liability (no recurrent revenue stream). That's how I interpret the situation. I expect art engine to be pooled with all the weta and ziva dynamics talents to make a single points of entry for visual development, so they can share experiences.

Which is bad for you and me (i'm dirt poor), but unprofitable unity is just shy away from potential death, which would be bad for everyone.

 

I don't know about this DOTS stuff. What I know is that unity didn't managed to finish building a game with their own engine. For a moment I've was fooled that I'm just stupid and I can't finish a game by myself. Thank you for confirming that it was not me.

From the end of 2019 till February this year I was using unity and I was dealing with days and weeks at the time of finding solution to bugs. Having my project get busted with no apparent reason just by saving a level or clicking on an object in scene.

Meanwhile while I was in unity hell, the unreal team added a lot of game related improvements. Things that I find now are so helpful for me as a developer, stuff that doesn't exist in unity. Yes, you can buy some asset store dude solution to enhance the engine, and I've done that. But as you have mentioned yourself, once again confirmed, external assets doesn't play well with the engine. Bolt and text mesh pro. If you, the dev team behind the engine can't make them work what chance do I have? Think about it, I need to be better than the team that builds the engine. Not gonna happen for 99.9% of us.

I'm now using unreal, which I should had been done two years ago, and it appears the work is going somewhere. At least the unreal editor doesn't hangs out for 10 minutes at the time.

 

Oh WOW! That's F***ing disgusting!!

 

For me, this is very sad, but at the same time, this finally gives me a kick to learn Unreal. I'm almost 9 years in Unity, but with every new knowledge learned, I learn about a couple of problems that exist in Unity and nobody cares. New 3rd party tool -> new bugs-> new custom solutions. For my last 2 years, I believe 1 year was solving or bypassing some problems with engine or 3rd party tools I used (because Unity cannot ship it), and not developing new features.

 

Footage of the Unity executives managing the company:

 

It's good to hear some optimistic news finally

 

Well, I don't like everything being on the cloud (depending on the cost as well), but other than that this doesn't seem that bad of an announcement.

 

@The_Island can u plz tell me what's happening with worldbuilding tools?? the Product board page for those tools hasn't showed any major progress for 1+ years!!

 

It's frustrating that Unity has so many fantastic employees interacting with the community, but their posts are scattered and fall to the wayside. Unity needs a better means of dispersing these posts.

People become accustomed to where they can get great Unity information, they learn how often these posts are made and where, and they form a habit of finding this information in a quality spot with engaging conversation. It's all about create a RYTHM of communication. This creates brand loyalty and positive feedback that directly makes the engine better. This area does no currently exist, and we users now run around with our heads chopped off screaming the sky is falling.

The post above demonstrates this problem, someone tries to link to quality info, but that post is locked and dated, and several links need to be followed to a random post to a forum that is rarely used. How about a sticky in the General forum that has a few links to the most exciting threads with a nice big fat "HEY LOOK AT THE COOL CRAP GOING ON" at the start of the post.

Right now the forums are bloated and underutilized with overall communication and faith in the brand suffering. The best posters are also swamped with work to do, but some regimen for where to make posts that actually get eyes and engagement would go along way.

On a few occasions I've wondered, "where is the suggestions forum?" while also wondering "why do all these outdated forums have so much prominent real estate on the webpage?". You almost get the feeling this is by design to try to shake the user from a time when Unity wasn't something anyone wanted to talk about. But that seems to be changing.

Unity has all the key components to build a FANTASTIC repertoire with their customers. The_Island, as others have pointed out is doing a fantastic job of representing the company right now in this thread. I also want to give a shoutout to Lauren Gibert who sets a standard for consistent, inspiring, and insightful posts. Unity employees by and large do a top notch job of engaging with the community and should be encouraged to post in prominent areas with weekly company updates linking to their posts, maybe even chop these posts up and task someone with making a weekly newsletter from the various posts made week to week.

It's a shame to see posts with such fantastic, optimistic information in random corners of the forums, while people are bitching and moaning there is no communication in the areas that are trafficked. No matter how great the post, how good the information or news is in that post, if people don't feel like it's being engaged with, it doesn't feel "real" which is why the clickbait rage has taken over.

The forum system needs spring cleaning, scale things down FFS, and put the massive # of niche forums all in one area tucked away below the core forums like suggestions, feedback, general, announcements, etc. Even better, link to these forums from the unity client to make it possible for the user to find them and directly link to this quality content to the end user.

I think the problem is over the years Unity has grown afraid of engaging with the users, because they were overhauling so many things and time and again they were caught with their pants down with an inferior product, the packages were clunky, there were lots of crashes, prefabs were buggy, everything was in a state of beta and we could only guess if there were bright days ahead, and everything pointed to no, but now they're sitting on something pretty amazing with a bright future.

Ironically, as everyone talks up Unreal and how amazing the graphics are in that suite while raging that it's hard to make games in Unity, Unity makes it so damned easy to actually make a game at every stage of development. While Unreal may do crazy lighting, Unity does what really matters to so many of us "F***ing idiots", it makes it easier to develop the "secret sauce" of fun with robust tools like prefabs, the package manager, C#, the ergonomic UI that makes iterating a breeze. Unity, your messaging needs to match this.

 

Artengine was quietly dropped as well. No PR. I mean, I could've told Unity on day one it'd never benefit them (way better alternatives exist, way cheaper) but hey, that's execs without knowledge of the industry.

Juan puts it best:
https://twitter.com/reduzio/status/1548940909328351232?s=20&t=hNizSDiMJ0wrMI7XjKWmuQ

Interestingly, it looks like they are folding art engine into what Unity calls "Cloud based Tools" which will obviously be done on the web with some kind of Adobe like subscription scheme with special living brand box icons and such.

I get that it's cool to monetise services (I recommended Unity did) but we need to have the proper nuts and bolts game development progress we have called for and lacked for many years now.

 

You have to remember that back in the day (before 2019?) the company hasn't even bothered to update its roadmap. Unity was marketing every new, experimental feature as much as they could just to rewrite it or abandon it a few months later. At the same time, new tech releases were coming out with obvious, unacceptable issues. There were also more nasty situations like #SRPLife and surface shaders. As far as I remember, unity 2018 LTS is still the fastest version of the engine, and since then, the performance is worse.

I've worked in Unity and in unreal. While both have some significant issues, the overall experience was always less painful in unreal engine (4). There were more various QoLs spread everywhere, and all tools scaled rather well, unlike the ones in Unity which are sometimes unusable outside of the jam-sized game.

Also, Epic has been primarily focusing on improving its tech. They tend to buy companies just like unity does, but Epic's primary point is to integrate them into the engine. You can look at the plugins like TextMeshPro, Probuilder, Polybrush, Progrids, Bolt, and Cinemachine. While most of these are at least good, sometimes even necessary tools. They were never properly integrated into the engine.

At the same time, unity has been buying companies without a second thought. Most of these buyouts never made any sense like with ArtEngine. It always felt like they were going for large numbers and big, trendy words instead of what would be the best for their consumers.

I could go on more about how terribly and unacceptably managed unity is. Just remember that exporting a model from Blender to Unity is still a painful process.

 

No - I evaluated it and determined that while really interesting, in our case it wouldn't be a good use of time and resources. Getting buy-in on something like this is hard enough to do when the tools are relatively open and have already generated a degree of industry acceptance. You're taking a risk and have to convince often (rightly) skeptical stakeholders, crucially the artists themselves.

My sense was that the tool itself was a great fit and lead by a brilliant team. But seeing the way that it was pay-walled and poorly marketed sounded alarm bells. It felt like it wasn't likely to see the integration in the editor that it deserved and would at some point be dropped, which, barring an official public statement, seems to be exactly what happened. Maybe eventually it will live on in some form of service, and I do sincerely hope it succeeds. But in the meantime the industry will have continued to evolve in this area, with tools that are more readily accessible and that have been shaped by wizards living in the field.

 

@The_Island straight question: if you were me, what would you do in Unity to make the most money, today? Would it be ads + mobile stuff?

 

It's subjective, I've worked a good bit in Unreal as well on various projects and in various roles.

In terms of an artist or level designer opening a package and getting cool stuff done, Unreal is head and shoulders above Unity, it's streamlined, integrated, and does what you'd expect a game engine to do, because Unreal is designed for specific platforms and has been form the beginning, a lot of their package fits really nicely together, "it just works". But lately the package and modular nature of Unity is showing promise. I wouldn't say it's realized just yet, but the stage is set for rapid advancement in any given area.

You have the modular package manager now online and working very well, and you have the superior DOTS back end coming online, that's exciting as F***. We will hopefully be seeing superior animation tools, terrain, post process, EVERYTHING in the Unity engine is now in a position that it can be greatly improved, and unlike Unreal, it doesn't need to be specially integrated into the UI, it doesn't need to try to match that ultra cohesive standard. That's exciting. It means more updates, it means less time engineers are burning out fixing tertiary bugs, it means a wider variety of people with a wider variety of skillsets can work to make Unity better in ways where they don't need to be inside the walls of Unity.

Unreal is superior in the extremes of gamedev. If you're a massive team making a big AAA title and you have a throng of developers micromanaging every little thing to squeeze the most out of an established franchise, or if you're new to gamedev and just want to throw things into a scene that look cool, and play around with blueprints.

In the middle ground, where you want to generate new IPs, new gameplay experiences, get your hands dirty with code and start shoving the nuts and bolts together to create gameplay objects, generate prefabs and create interesting digital entities that do interesting things, Unity has a superior pipeline IMO.

Yes, the integrated nature of Unreal's post process stack is slick and so nice to use... but the entire engine is also very pigeon holed, it's not expandable and moving forward Unreal will not be able to scale, not just in its digital form, but in terms of the types of teams and projects that are able to utilize the platform.

You can see the current vision of Unity coming together, you can see DOTS on the verge of release, you can se this really ergonomic package system finally online and working pretty well, the existing tools of animation systems are functional and the client as a whole just works better and feels cohesive.

All that said none of this means anything is DOTS isn't approachable, if they do not open channels of communication and resources for outside developers to help the random talent out there producing who knows what to engage with the engine, reach users and produce tools and plugins that mesh well with the engine.

It's an exciting time in the lifecycle of Unity, so much investment and planning is finally on the verge of being released, seems a little silly to be hyper focused on a singular monetization aspect with so much cool stuff going on in the background.

 

If you want to make quick bucks with the least amount of risk, you have three options:
- F2P small mobile games (or even adult games) with addictive gambling design and liveops/services
- Work at Meta, (I can setup a chat with a friend that works there)
- Do Unity consulting
First option means, you are treating games purely as a business (possibly harming business), not primary as passion or art medium. Second option, might sound silly but you can get a good salary with the amount of years you have been working with Unity as a lead (or even as a senior). I can't disclose the amount of money Meta offered me but is crazy high. Third option, depends on your knowledge level of Unity but I've done consulting on many startups companies that have been fully funded with absolute no idea how to develop their 3D apps, like nothing. Most of those companies will pay everything (fly, hotels, etc) and almost* whatever you ask to get them running.
PS: I personally have a moral bar to maintain so option 1 for me is a nono.

 

That sounds annoyingly like something I'd write. But... I do rather love to make things so I'll just do that. I think mobile can't really be sensible for individuals. It suits the giant teams making most of the content today, though.

I'll enjoy my desktop / console / vr moderate income to come.

 

Completely off topic but when the CEO of Epic Games is posting flattering memes of Aras, you know he would like to hire him. Like BADLY.
https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1543306898723807234

 

This is very disappointing news. I was really looking forward to learning how the professionals make games. Not to mention, everyone’s Unity games would look better because we would have a proper example.

 

@Andy-Touch could you share a bit about how the character controller was made in GIGAYA
I really want to know about it since I'm making one right now. Just the basics of how it works would be good enough

 

I wouldnt be surprised if in August he had "Epic magician" in his bio

 

If Unity approves my request for custom tools, tech and assets to be usable by former Internal Productions Team members for portfolio purposes then I possibly will do a write-up on a solo blog thing. But also depends if and who I would be working for in the future. Contracts are a funny thing to navigate!

 

Check this link out, a bit after the 3 hour 30 minute mark Andy goes into the character controller: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1449773728

 

Yeah, it is. I can attest. LOL

 

That's not true at all. Unreal Engine is used by smaller teams successfully. Not sure where did you get that idea.

I partially agree about stretching the engine for inconvenient gameplay mechanics. Unity is easier for that, but If you can pull it off in unreal, then you should expect it to scale very well. Something that I can't expect from unity.

Also, there are types of games that are hard to pull off in unity due to the general junkiness of the toolkit. That's how game engines are, so far, no one has made a single solution for everything. My point was that unreal focus on things that matter and that this strategy has been paying off for years.

I can't see that, at best in over five years. The DOTS is indeed supposed to get released by the end of this year, but that won't solve all the issues. The editor still will be slow and junky. The toolkit often will be outdated compared to competitors and sometimes unusable. It will take years for everything to come together with the speed the unity is progressing today, and in a few years, I feel like the competitors will go far ahead unity.

 

I would really love it if you could do a blog on it, how all the systems worked and interacted with each other.

 

Ghost of a Tale developer revealed that Ghost of a Tale's follow-up game will use Unreal Engine 5 instead of Unity.
https://twitter.com/SeithCG/status/1547895268728643586

check the reasons why he left unity for UE5

 

Well one doesn't simply hire Aras. Aras hires the company instead, but they pay him for that privilege.

 

as one single dev that never created a game before or worked in the industry I can say that using unreal is way more productive than unity. So people saying that is not a good engine for small teams or lacks ways to expand for big teams are wrong or trolling.

I've used both and I've accomplished more for my game from February till now, than in two previous years when I've used unity.

I'm not the most expert to say this but isn't the unreal source engine open? I looking at unreal forum and some time more knowledgeable people in C++ will just post a solution where you can change the engine source code to fix an issue or improve it. Yes, you need to know what are you doing, but try that with unity.

You are complaining about using C++ instead of C#? That is because you can change the engine source code, that is why you use C++.

I'm just using blueprints, works fine for what I'm trying to do.

Did I need to tell you again that unreal is building one of the most successful game of all time using unreal and that works on consoles, mobile and computers? And that the tools they include in the editor where made to help them build this game more efficient and are tools that make sense for game development?

I don't want to be that guy but talk about the CEOs of various companies how much you like don't try to trick people in thinking this engine is great. We are in a thread about unity not being able to finish a game. One single game. Meanwhile the broken unreal engine is used to create a game that brings billions of dollars in revenues.

And this company CEO thinks can make more money by focusing on ads. Is lucky that those investment funds that buy unity shares are run by old people that never played a game in their life. They made money with ads in the media, that is true. So the try the same trick.

 

Fair point TBH. We haven't exactly been quiet asking Unity for the same things over many years, so it's their fault if someone goes.

 

In general, it's hard to find games that have achieved commercial success and were made by less than 10 people. This kind of success is becoming rarer and rarer every year. Obviously, there are games like that in UE, Unity Godot, and other engines. One example I have found by googling is bright memory.

Anyway, I was talking about this statement.

It's still absurd and untrue in my eyes.