What to show in Demo of Unity

Next month I will be giving a demo of Unity to my local Mac programmers group and was wondering what Unity features and capabilities I should show off. I will probably build something but I do not yet know what I should highlight. From your experiences with Unity what do you think?

 

Particle effects are pretty and once you have it sussed, easy.
Drag and drop a few scripts that you can mod in front of them...?
AC

 

Another fun thing is importing a boned mesh, making it a ragdoll in Unity (piece of cake), and then cruelly letting it plummet to earth, perhaps via several obstacles.

Great for showing off PhysX.

 

My standard one goes like this:

Have a background scene prepared (FPS demo)

Drag in an FPS controller
Take a box, add a rigidbody, Make a stack
Make a spotlight, parent it to the player, (practice this step in order to parent it to the correct child).
then add the SmoothParentRotation Show how it's just a script and variables show up for inspector editing.

Finally, create a trigger and do a Physics.gravity.y = 0 in the OnTriggerEnter.

If you have more time, make a new script where you do:
light.enabled = Random.value > .3;
Add this script to the player's spotlight to make it flicker.

Take a look in the attached video. It's a pitch I did way back, but I usually follow the same structure

 

Wow that is an awesome and very informative demo Nicholas, you make it look so easy. Although I pretty much know what Unity is capable of (even if I am not), to see it in action like this is great. More of these please
Thanks
Boxy

 

It took about 28 hours to make that video ;-) Looks can be decieving...

 

Where on earth did you find a spare 28 hours? Rhetorical, sorry I won't distract from the original thread subject any longer.
Cheers
Boxy

 

I presented it to a game dev group, and the three things that got the best reaction were:

1. Physics in action

2. One-window drag-and-drop workflow WITHOUT dozens of other dialogs to wade through

3. How quickly a beginner can go from zero to playable (I showed my own game)

 

Whatever you show them during the "How to Make Your Game" portion of your demo, be sure at the end to demonstrate how with just two clicks Unity exports your project to either Windows, Mac, Web or Widget.

That's still a jaw-dropper for me.

 

You all have great ideas, and Nicholas, that is an awesome video! I will start working something up. Good idea to use some of the assets from the FPS sample since I am artwork "challenged". I will start working on my presentation in a few days

 

Two examples that are well-received:

* Goo-Ball! Tell 'em it was done with a much older version of Unity than the current one, and point out the nifty refraction.

* The FPS tutorial. It's pretty impressive that something that involved (it even has turrets!) is one of the newbie tutorials! Plus stop and look at the pretty water.

Also, if Garen didn't mind, his forest demo is pretty cool.

 

I would go with physics as this is always nice to play around with.

If you keep it simple and limit yourself to the stuff which is working in unity then it's the easiest implementation i've seen so far.