What if you were in charge of the next Unity demo?
What storyline would you use, what setting would you choose?
As Unity often end up pushing what the engine can do in their demos, would you focus on or need any specific technology or aspect of the engine that could be improved?
PS: This would by my Unity Demo…
Go for a Pixar style, with a sci-fi setting, characters start on planet then launch into space to fight off a horde of invaders. Only with wacky comedy and fun.
The technical aim is to have a massive fleet of invaders and a space battle above a planet (Hint the Transform threading system could be useful here). And to transition smoothly from ground to orbit and back again. This should push the procedural generation and tessellation features as well as the terrain system.
But what would you like to see Unity do and what improvements would you focus on?
It would also need space minions, best use of the capsule mesh ever!
For me it’d go a bit like this. Inspirational music in the background, no sound effects. A single dev into a dark room with a desk lamp and a computer, working hard. Then, a few transitions portraying the time that passes by and the developer getting better, meeting people, releasing products, failing, struggling, getting back up, etc. until he makes it. He’s finally happy, it paid off. Then, final transition to Unity’s logo.
Imo, no better demo for unity than a representation of a developer’s struggles while displaying the engine’s potential at the same time.
I want them to make a game not a visual demo, pick the blacksmith or adam demo, turn it into a full open game with generic quest but running decently, having good control (reaction time) and showing how it’s done. I wouldn’t mind reuse of assets, poor questing, dumb level design, confusing UI (as long it is functional), it’s a demo of what can be achieved not trying to be a good game.
Look. If you’re making a movie then threaded transforms/procedural generation aren’t even needed for it.
You can prepare necessary data offline, use it in the engine, and make it look aweseome. “Pushing” anything won’t be even necessary.
If it is another movie demo…
combat-heavy movie either in dark fantasy or cyberpunk-sish setting.
I actually have two ideas in mind I’d love to implement, if I had manpower/budget.
@Arowx , you’re making a classic mistake of thinking that “To do X I need Y”. People often use that to procrastinate, by the way, occasionally taking it to ridiculous level.
In reality… most of the time you don’t need Y at all. You can just start working on X and make it happen when you sink enough hours in it. Magic is not needed. Same applies to buzzword tech.
My point is that Unity often use their demos to push the engines technology. Your example could also improve the game engine. It was just one aspect of the demo that I thought Unity currently lacks, dynamically destructible stuff. And would be a nice feature to add.
Hint: PhysX:: Blast SDK is open source and on GitHub (link)
There are several destruction related assets on the store.
Also… number of games that support dynamic destruction is incredibly small. The games I remember are Red Faction 1, Black and White 2 plus we have Metal Gear Rising Revengeanse with their slicing tech. Well, there was also Red Faction 3 when it was applied to buildings. And that’s pretty much it. The rest is heavily constrained. This is because destruction related tech is highly experimental and as a result usually not suitable for production. Meaning there are cool tech demos here and there, but usually people decide it is not worth the trouble.
Destruction is highly specifics to design, specs and games’ goal. You can’t have a generic destruction system, and most destruction system are really swapping mesh with precut “gibs” … nothing really complex … in some way unity already provide that.
“Procedural” destruction need to be heavily design to not have the game turn into chaos and block the player, so you will have a system that need to cut but also prioritize and manipulate physics based on the generated “gibs”. Unity can’t decide at your place what to do, destruction are generally nerf n game for a reason.
So here is the Blender Animation ‘Demo’, blender also uses a regular ‘annual’ Animation Demo to push and improve it’s technology.
I think it’s a great demo with a fun storyline and it’s derived from a comic book character.
Would this be a good way to approach the next Unity demo, use ‘with permission’ an existing comic book IP. You get a wealth of ideas, backstory, jokes and hopefully a more fun demo.
So if Unity did a comic book demo what character/comic would you choose?
I mean that existing character is someones IP. By default they will not allow you to use it. Even if the demo is not released to community and you just upload a “trailer”/pre-rendered movie.
What if the IP holder views the Unity Demo as free advertising of it’s IP. They get their existing IP linked to and viewed by the Unity game development community.
I’ll admit that other game engines might have higher rated brands but this would be a good way to tie your IP to the ideas of fun, creativity and future technology (AR/VR).
For instance Rebellion were recently asking for game studios who would like to work with their IP. Or there is IP like Games Workshop that tend to be more open to third party games using their IP.
I don’t think unity have the talent to create relatable iconic character anyway, they should stick to weird generic stuff with a small twist like blacksmith and adam. The artsy side have some cachet.
Well sometimes an IP especially in the comic book domain is little know e.g. Valerian and a city of a thousand planets.
On a counter note there are some amazing ideas that have been explored in the comic book domain simply because it does not take a huge budget to realise them well in this media.
