Unity Technologies commenced its first ever edition of “Unite India” on 8 November at HICC, Hyderabad. The event is for two days from 8 to 9 November 2017. As attendees, who not so surprisingly comprised of a lot of students as well, swarmed the registration desks, you could see a lot of familiar faces from the industry throughout, catching up with their fellow colleagues.
Unite is the most important gathering of Unity developers, artists, publishers, educators and enthusiasts. Speaking of Unity, it is one of the leading platforms in the market for creating video games, simulations and other interactive 3D and 2D content.
The event is an eyeopener to gain valuable insights on the latest Unity features and also stay up-to-date with the latest market trends. It is also an arena for gaming industry experts to know about what it takes to succeed, and how one can test one’s skills with the Unity Certification Exam.
As soon as the registrations were complete, a bunch of students went in for the Unity Certification exam and you could see the rest sitting around in the BYOG section in the expo hall.
As the crowd settled in places, SmartVizx’s Chandan Singh took to the stage for the very first session- Postmortem: Hephaestus – A VR based architectural drawing tool. As the title suggests, the speaker and his colleague posted a breakdown on the plus points and challenges of the tool.
The session was followed by UnderDOGS’ Vaibhav Chavan taking the stage to speak about the journey of their upcoming game ‘Mukti’ through the developer’s perspective. He stressed on how the Unity community is much more active than Unreal Engine’s and how it assisted them in getting feedback on points they pondered upon. He also mentioned how the light baking helped them in increasing the FPS shortcomings for their title.
Threye Interactive’s Anurag Rana shared how simulations made through Unity have been assisting the Indian troops in training through various scenarios including soldier training, flying an aircraft and much more.
While the talks continued in full swing, the expo area was gaining traction as a string of booths, mostly consisting of indie gaming and VR studios showcased their offerings to the enthusiasts. The expo area was pretty engaging already, however a few stalls still remained vacant or in the process of embellishing for NGDC, which is slated to begin from the next day.
Networking and meetings could easily be said to be the major agenda around the expo. Post lunch, the folks from Unity Technologies took to the stage for the keynote. With a lot of stories of success from Indian developers using Unity, a few announcements were made further. A collaboration with Autodesk’s Maya and a new 2D tool were announced. Cinemachine for 2D and Tilemap, the first grid-based 2D tool from the brand were declared as well. Following the announcements, the speakers borrowed assets from EpicHouse Studios’ 2D platformer, Phased, to demonstrate the running of the 2D tools.
With sessions going on till the evening, the crowd was intact till the end, juggling between conference halls and the expo.
All the talks seem to however point to one thing in particular that how easy Unity has made it for the developers. Arguably every speaker, in some way focused on the simplicity of the offerings from Unity.
Day two of Unite India’s debut edition is yet to be seen, but given that the show shares the same venue and even expo with NGDC, day two seems to be even more promising with more talks and more people around!
