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If you're like me, the concept of a VR Light Cycle game from Tron was a dream you always had as a kid. Well now you're in luck!Read more...

This is the latest in the series of articles about the art technology of games, in collaboration with the particularly handsome Dead End Thrills.

Somewhere in the region of the demoscene and modern game jam is Noctuelles, home of mysterious New Zealander Orihaus and the ‘strange places’ he calls ‘games’. Ghostly ‘megastructures’ of stark, sometimes procedurally generated geometry, his Unity-powered projects can seem a million light years from purported genres including flight sim and survival horror. Then you get Xaxi, “a virtual memory palace of sorts, designed to teach Aliceffekt’s Conlang Traumae, and examine the possibilities of learning and memory in interactive virtual environments.”

All of which begs the question: is Orihaus really happy making places for their own sake? We, of course, are getting comfortable with the idea, funding and exploring worlds and ideas that often far outstretch any explicit gameplay – and why not? But what does the future hold for Noctuelles, and what are we supposed to think of it in the meantime? … [visit site to read more]

In theory I’m working with someone to make a game in Unity, but I’ve yet to progress past the “very long Word documents with overwritten design ideas” stage myself. However, at some point I fully intend to fiddle under the hood to some degree, and as such today’s news of a big old update to Unity is going to affect me at some point. For now though, I’m not the best person to ask about quite why the newly-announced Unity 5 is quite so exciting, but judging from how the throngs of developers took a break from hard drinking and massed backslapping at GDC to light up Twitter with breathless wonder at the listed features for this increasingly ubiquitous game engine, it appears to be one hell of a big deal in devland.

From a games-player point of view, this is very likely to shape a lot of the indie games (big and small) that we’ll be playing over the next couple of years. As far as I can tell, two of the most promising additions are heightened visual spangliness and – potentially – running games in browser without the need for a plugin.

… [visit site to read more]

Android phone and tablet owners and iOS devotees might not be quite so divided in the video game space soon. Features recently added to Google Play game services, the tool used by developers to manage items like leaderboards and achievements in Android, included new multiplayer options for iOS devices. Additionally, as Engadget pointed out, an update to the Unity engine allows cross-platform multiplayer for iOS and Android players.

Google Play game services also received a change to their categories, bringing the total number of video game genres on the platform to 18. Lastly, Google plans to launch a "game gifts" service, which will allow players to send one another in-game items. The company launched its game services software development kit in May 2013 as an answer to Apple's Game Center service. Google also recently purchased Android controller manufacturer Green Throttle Games. [Image: Google]

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack s dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dult boy. All work and no,play makes Jack a Dull Boy.Read more...

For the past two months, environment artist Robert Briscoe has been working to make Dear Esther run in Unity, rather than Valve's Source Engine, and he has some pretty gifs to show for it. He's bringing the entire game to Unity, six years after it launched as a free Source engine mod and two years after it launched as a separate game, also in Source. In a blog post, Briscoe asks the question on everyone's mind, "Why would you want to port Dear Esther, a fully finished game on a solid engine, over to an entirely new engine so late after release?"

Thankfully, he also answers the question, with a bit of background information: Briscoe, thechineseroom's Dan Pinchbeck and Jessica Curry, and coder Jack Morgan made the 2012 PC launch game, and then the team split to work on their own things (Amnesia, anyone?). Briscoe outsourced the Mac and Linux ports of Dear Esther to two separate teams, which have since dissolved and stopped bug-fixing those versions. Another, native Linux port, is still in beta and looks like it's staying that way.

Briscoe received a "huge bill" for the middleware included in Source Engine but not covered in the original licensing deal. The team wasn't aware of the middleware or its fees before getting the bill, and it had to pay for a separate license for each platform. "It was a big hit financially, which put us at a loss in terms of the Mac and Linux ports," Briscoe says.

A few game developers decided that for some reason, Unity, the 3D game engine, is the perfect medium for a text adventure. Amazingly, it turns out that they were right.Read more...

Ever wonder why cats love knocking stuff off of shelves? Because it's fun, that's why. Indie developer Chris Chung tackles this aspect of feline fascination in Catlateral Damage, a first-person action game that casts the player in the role of a particularly destructive cat.

In Catlateral Damage, players hop up on overhead surfaces and send household objects crashing to the floor with repeated paw swipes. Break enough of your owner's valuables (hint: combos award point multipliers) and you win. For anyone who has never owned cats, this is a fairly accurate simulation of what their day-to-day life entails. Cats are jerks.

The current alpha version of the game is playable for free online, and is available as a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux. A paid version is set to launch later this year via Steam Greenlight.

Introduced in 2005 as an iOS game development tool, Unity has grown into a multi-platform monster, used to make games for everything from Facebook to consoles — but none of that really mattered, until it got an official anime mascot. Meet Unity-Chan. Read more...

The abstract, retro-inspired minds of Arcane Kids crafted a suitably bizarre, beautifully bad tribute to Bubsy 3D this week, and you can play it in your browser right now.

While it ostensibly resembles the 1996 PlayStaton game, Arcane Kids' version takes you on an unwieldy tour of the real-life ongoing James Turrell Retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In contrast to the PlayStation game's abysmal take on 3D, the LACMA exhibition is a celebration of the artist's vision of light and space.

Once you're done with the tour, however, things start to get really weird. We're talking the last episode of The Prisoner weird, complete with an unerring propensity of skeletons and an overriding sense of dread.

While the controls and presentation mirror the terribleness that was Bubsy 3D, Arcane Kids' game is an aptly bizarre mixture of nostalgia and artistic thinking, and easily the best weird 15 minutes of the week. Strangely, it made me want to return to 2D SNES-generation game Bubsy in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind, which I was young and stupid enough to think was pretty good when I played it.

Yesterday.

I have spent hours today playing a strategy game on my PC. Hours. It wasn't Civ V. It wasn't Rome II. It wasn't even Company of Heroes 2. It was a tiny little game called Kingdoms.Read more...

Facebook has issued a new SDK aimed at expediting the integration of the site's identity and social features into games made by Unity developers.

"Whether you're building on iOS, Android, web, or all three, the SDK lets you continue to write in C# and provide social game experiences to all your players, regardless of the platform they play on," the announcement blog post on Facebook's developer section reads. Over 90 million monthly active Facebook users have Unity installed - more than triple the number of users in the first half of 2013.

260 million people are playing games on Facebook each month and is increasingly becoming more popular. In July, Facebook announced a pilot program for publishing mobile games.

MIT Game Lab's OpenRelativity toolset, which powered its psychedelic first-person collection game/physics demonstration A Slower Speed of Light, is now available for free through Github. The toolkit works in both free and paid versions of Unity.

OpenRelativity allows for the real-time simulation of principles such as time dilation, Lorentz transformation and relativistic Doppler shift by allowing the designer to augment the ways in which light behaves. As it turns out, light moving at the speed it normally does is pretty dang essential to our world not transforming into a disorienting funhouse where cause and effect are meaningless. Who could have guessed?

Lacuna Passage is an upcoming Unity-based game by Random Seed, which puts you on the surface of Mars. Real Mars, not sci-fi Mars. You play as the astronaut Jessica Rainer, sent to Mars to investigate why the first mission to Mars disappeared. Described as as "open-world Mars exploration and survival game with a mystery to uncover", it's a safe bet whatever got the first mission will also try and get you. OK, so there's probably some kind of sci-fi twist to it, but on the whole, I love how it's prioritising the brutality of just existing on an alien planet, making simple things like gravity, oxygen and air pressure the most important things you have to worry about. Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy are my favourite sci-fi books of all time because they do such a good job of representing this, so it'll be interesting to see how fun it is to actually play. You can follow the game's development at the link below. Lacuna Passage [Site]

Unity Technologies, creators of the multi-platform Unity engine and its tools, is making its mobile tools free to indies and small studios starting today, taking tools that cost around $800 and making them free. Unity currently supports Apple's iOS and Google's Android, with support for BlackBerry and Microsoft's Windows Phone 8 to be added at no additional cost in the future.

"Mobile games development is possibly the most dynamic and exciting industry in the world, and it's an honor to be able to help so many developers be so successful in fulfilling their visions and in building their businesses," said Unity CEO David Helgason. "We were able to make Unity free for the web and for desktop computers a while ago, but have been dreaming of doing the same for mobile for what seems like forever."

To contextualize this, Unity is already a beast in the mobile field in terms of market share and developer relations. The company just opened the flood gates further.

Markus 'Notch' Persson, best known for the mega-hit Minecraft and his affinity for fedoras, has released a free browser-based typing game entitled Drop.

The Unity-powered title is simple in concept: players type as the world transforms into a pulsating aural journey through a tunnel of heavy electronic music. As new words appear, the time to complete the required letters shortens, which speeds the experience.

Despite our expert typing skills - as evidenced by our intricate and always hilarious puns - Drop sessions end within seconds. According to the creator, Drop was inspired by a number of experiences, including Terry Cavanagh's Super Hexagon, the ending of Polytron's Fez and - for its visuals - his ceiling. Unlike the first two notes of inspiration, Notch's ceiling did not make Joystiq's 2012 'Best of the Year' list.

Play Drop for free on Notch's personal website.

While fans wait to play ox10c, the next big release from Minecraft creator Marcus Persson, he quietly unveiled a free Unity game over the weekend. It's called Drop, and if you ever wanted to play Super Hexagon but with typing, well, this is your game. Drop [Site]

In lieu of his Ludum Dare game, Notch today launched a Unity game called Drop, available online for free. Notch is, of course, the mastermind behind Minecraft, and Drop is a quick exercise in rapid wordsmithery, spinning and catchy tunes.

Notch attributes inspiration for Drop to Super Hexagon, the ceiling of his apartment and the ending of Fez, and after playing for a little while, that all sounds about right. We would also throw in a vibe from Pippin Barr's 30 Flights of Loathing and Pottermore's Spells game.

If you have some time today, maybe make nimble your fingers and give Drop a go. But first try to say that sentence five times fast.

Multiplatform game engine Unity is getting a little less multiplatform. "As of today, we will stop selling Flash deployment licenses," CEO David Helgason announced. " We will continue to support our existing Flash customers throughout the 4.x cycle."

Helgason said that the decision to stop supporting Flash was motivated by what Unity sees as a lack of commitment to Flash on the part of Adobe, because of player instability, canceled projects, and various other factors.

Besides which, "Developers are moving away from Flash, and while Flash publishing has gotten little traction, our own Unity Web Player has seen unprecedented growth in recent months."

Today, all of us at Unity Technologies are thrilled to announce a partnership with SCEA that will see Unity tools developed for PlayStation platforms! We’ll be making games built on Unity deployable to PS4, PS3, PS Vita, PS Mobile, and SCE’s future cloud services.

So what is Unity? Well, it’s only the most widely used game creation toolset and engine in the world. It’s so popular because it’s based on the idea of democratizing game development. That means making as many awesome and powerful tools available to as many developers as possible, regardless of how big or small their company or team. Unity is elegant, efficient, approachable, extensible, and affordable. Unity makes it easy to iterate and Unity does the heavy lifting when porting games to other platforms. Code is automatically converted, and just polish and optimization for that specific platform needs to be added. But all the other stuff — the art, the game logic, artificial intelligence, sound — everything else, remains the same.

Plenty of huge publishers like EA, Ubisoft, Kabam, Square Enix, and Nexon are using Unity for a variety of projects, but even more exciting is the massive number of independent developers enjoying incredible success in their creative and business endeavors. Its incredible that we’re now able to work with PlayStation to help many of these studios find success across its powerful platforms.

In fact, we have supported PS3 for a while now with several great titles already shipped, though the rest of the PlayStation deployment tools are not yet ready for public consumption (although Funbits did do some great work themselves to bring the beautiful and clever Escape Plan to PS Vita).

For just a fraction of the hundreds of games currently being developed by the Unity community, visit our gallery. There’s a great cross section of games to give you an idea of the incredible breadth of talent developing games with Unity.

SCE and Unity will have more info to share in the coming months, so keep an eye out!

The Drowning will forgo traditional emulated joysticks seen in other touch-interface shooters, instead opting for taps and swipes as the chief means of control.

Left a bit. Too far! Right. Right. RIGHT! Oh sorry, I didn’t see you there. I was just practicing telling Wasteland 2 developers inXile what to do with the assets I’m ready, willing, and prepared to generate for Wasteland 2. And because I’m lovely and like to share these things, I’m going to tell you how you can be in the position to have a building or prop in their upcoming apocalyptic RPG. Engine makers Unity and inXile are teaming up to allow gamers to take part in paid-for work for the game. Just, you know, be exceptional.(more…)

#unity Version 4.0 of the Unity platform is available for purchase and download today. This is important, because eventually every game not made with the Unreal Engine will be made with Unity. I am only exaggerating a little bit. More »

#petermolyneux [videothumb Game development's most seductive over-promiser doesn't work at Microsoft anymore. He's doing his own thing, starting up a company called 22 Cans and promising a life-altering experience in his next game Curiosity. The world at large hasn't really seen a look at the game. Until now. More »

Almost everyone knows about Playdead's Limbo, but the followup to that project, so far known only as "Project 2," is still shrouded in secrecy. Project 2, revealed a little while ago in a Danish grant report and listed as a 2014 release, is being developed in Unity, according to game director Arnt Jensen.

Limbo was constructed with its own game engine, but using a third-party engine on Project 2 will both save time, says Jensen, and allow them to release the game to "as many people as possible."

The screenshot above is the only part of the game seen thus far is above. According to Jensen, the boy may be one of several similarities between Limbo and the new game. "Many ideas were cut" from the first game, "right up until the very end," Jensen says. With Project 2, "we're still working with some of the ideas that didn't make it into Limbo."

If you want to experience what it's like being on Mars with NASA's Mars Rover, but don't want to die from the incredibly toxic atmosphere - and who wants to go through the hassle of traveling to Mars just for a gruesome death? - fire up your Xbox today.

A free Mars Rover Landing app on the Xbox Marketplace lets you use your body to guide the Curiosity rover to a safe landing, just like NASA would do if it didn't have specially designed equipment for more precise control of the device. There's also a Mars-focused experience in the Xbox programming education app Kodu.

Additionally, the new Unity app, Curiosity's Journey, lets you explore a 3D map of Mars' Gale Crater, following along with Curiosity's mission. Thanks for still being awesome, NASA.

Unity has announced version 4 of its game engine, available now in pre-order form from the company's store. Unity is used in everything from indie iOS hits to browser-based MMOs, and the new version of the engine contains a slew of new updates, including a new animation tech called Mechanim, better visual quality and rendering, and new options for publishing online with Adobe's Flash and in Linux.

All developers who pay the rather heavy license fee for the engine (the Pro version, at least - the current version is available as a free download if you just want to play with it) will get access to the new beta for free. And Unity promises more news about what Unity 4 can do for game developers at the upcoming Unite12 event in Amsterdam later this year.

Hey, developers! Erm. Just wanted to say hi, like. Also, you might be interested in the next version of the increasingly ubiquitous Unity engine, which is toting all sorts of hypermodern features (they even say ‘hypermodern’ themselves in their press release, so for once I’m not to blame for a superlative-based portmanteau) aimed at making it desirable to indies, mainstream, mobile and mucking-about devs alike.

DirectX 11 (as shown above, apparently), a new character animation tech called ‘Mecanim’ and publishing to Flash and Linux are the headline features of Unity 4, though there’s also (and less relevantly to this blog) a bunch of additional mobile gaming stuffs in there too. Basically, it’s Unity putting its arm around the Unreal engine’s girl, curling its lip into a knowing smirk and intoning those most sacred of words: Come at me, bro.(more…)

#codehero Code Hero isn't your basic first-person shooter. You'll have enemies, and you'll be "shooting" them, but it won't be with assault rifles and pistols. Instead, you shoot lines of Javascript to command the environment around you. Need a platform moved over? A certain kind of enemy eliminated in one fell swoop? There's a code for that. More »

I thought writing about else { Heart.break() } would prove to be a novelty, but three days later here I am, telling you about another game that lets you fiddle in its innards. I am now the official RPS expert, sorry “expert”, on games that allow you to alter their code: Code Hero is a Unity engine game where you have a code gun that shoots Javascript, and hopes the players learn enough from the action. According to the the devs: “Code Hero is an FPS where your Code Gun shoots code directly at a target and executes on impact. It references the target so you can act upon hitObject in your code or just hit.point if permissions are denied.” If you could see the face I’m making trying to comprehend that, you’d probably be calling for an ambulance. Video of it below.

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