Development Team Questions

We’re soon to be starting some Unity iOS development. We will eventually be having a team of probably 5 people, 3 programmers and 2 artists.

How do other similar teams organise themselves in terms of hardware, devices and software such as Maya?

  • Which team members require which versions of Unity?
  • Do we all need iOS Pro?
  • Do we all need Macs?
  • Can (and do) people share devices?
  • What do we do about source/asset sharing and control?

Which team members require which versions of Unity?

Do we all need iOS Pro?

  • only if you’re needing to use unity. As in fiddling with stuff, adding lights, and so on. Artist don’t. They’re artists…
  • technically other programmers on the team do not need unity, IF they are dealing with just code.
  • generally, if they use unity at all, they need unity licenses.
  • I don’t think you need unity pro and ios pro for every single person working on the game. You need at least unity pro for everyone working on a game that requires unity that uses pro features or the game is shipping with pro features, and who actually use unity itself. One license per “unity user”. If they aren’t directly using unity, its not a problem (ie artists and people who can code without the need to test).

It’s already a grey area, many people will pay for scripts and art and assets that ship with a pro build, however those people didn’t have pro who made those things. That is already “against” the license but I think common sense prevails here: if you are in a small studio and people need to use unity, get them a license for it.

Do we all need Macs?

  • only the guy submitting to the appstore and testing on the device.

Can (and do) people share devices?

  • sure you can do what you want in terms of mixing up the hardware.

What do we do about source/asset sharing and control?

  • perforce support is coming and you can buy an asset server license so you can have team members all work together.

I don’t know what kind of artists you work with but we like our artists to ‘fiddle’ with stuff. Artists know what looks good and need to tweak properties related to rendering. That being said, if they are spending the majority of their time modeling and creating textures then they probably just need access to a single Unity machine.

Don’t need unity at all? Is it a realistic solution to be coding scripts without being able to run the app?

Makes sense.

But, we need Pro for ‘External Version Control Support’ so we can use SVN for example?

So perhaps the artists can share a single Mac for previewing/tweaking, but I would see all the coders wanting to test on the device.

We’ll have to think about how this would work.

Does the ‘asset server license’ only relate to perforce?

Thanks for your help :slight_smile: