Note: I know this will cause a big splash, and a lot of questions will arise. That’s okay, feel free to ask me anything you want to know. But in any case I’ll try to anticipate some of your questions here.
First all, at this stage this does not mean an open publishing channel to the Nintendo Wii. You’ll still have to get devkits from Nintendo before getting a Unity Wii license. There is a lot of speculation about how much these cost (around US$2000 har been reported on various forums), and how hard they are to get. The only certainty is that they’re not available for normal purchasing, and that if you don’t try, you won’t get one
The Unity Wii license will also not be part of Unity Indie or Unity Pro, but purchased seperately and per-title.
What is a given, and has been written on the forum before, is that using Unity will be a big plus in Nintendo’s eyes. This is because a game demo made with Unity will have a technically straight porting path to the Wii. That way Nintendo will be able to feel more secure that you can pull of a Wii game, something that absolutely isn’t given if your team has to make a bare-metal port of a game.
As said in the press release, we are extremely excited about where this will take Unity (and you guys!)
Special 1 week discount for Unity for this? Sorry, I wanted to buy a Unity Indie license today but 25% taxes, good God! That’s 50 Euro more, I thought 200 Euro would be enough. Now I’ll have to save up another month or go with Torque :x Damn! But maybe there will a special “Whohoo, Unity is going Wii!” limited time discount :roll:
Hey Unitors - Wonderful to see this news made official. Any luck on the Wii programmer?
Ok, my big question: If one were to develop a game completely in unity on say, a mac - would it then be a given that the same game would run on a Wii given the proper dev tools, etc?
It would be nice to know that I can work with an Indie license for now, until I have something that I feel is worth presenting to Nintendo with the knowledge that if I ever did port a dev kit I wouldn’t have to do much (any?) work to get the thing to run on the Wii.
Also, do you guys have any idea what an equivalent hardware spec on the mac would be? This would help in knowing some basic limitations - i.e. if you wanted to keep your game at 60fps, what would your poly count limitations be, etc.
Thanks guys - and again - congrats. I can’t wait to see the first Unity game up on the Wii Channel!
Unity will empower you to make really cool games, and the technical means to actually get them onto the console. From there on you’ll have to convince Nintendo to publish your game.
This is because, like all the consoles, Nintendo’s Wii is entirely controlled by the consoler producer and games are published at it’s discretion.
Contrary to what is commonly thought, this holds true even for XBOX Live Arcade. Last summer I was talking to one of the major publishers, and they had been assigned just three (3!) “slots” for XBLA in 2008. And that’s a big publisher.
Historically, when Nintendo launches a new game device, almost all the available titles (so called “launch titles” have been made by Nintendo… over time they open up much more. So we expect the Wii to become more and more accessible to smaller developers over time.
Gentlemen: set your Wiimotes to stun and start making these crazy creative games already
As mentioned in another thread, he began working here yesterday
That’s the idea. Obviously not all our current customers are going to be working on Wii titles this spring, but we love the idea that we can provide a path towards it. So you can start with a tool for just US$249 without limiting your options down the road.
We’ll talk more about technical limitations down the road. In the meantime, simply read up on the Wii online. In particular the Wii has very limited texture memory and shader support, but my advice would be to concentrate on original gameplay and cool concepts, and you’ll be fine
And remember that someone got the Wiimote working with Unity (admittedly in a somewhat hackish way), so you should be able to get started experimenting with it immediately.
so that means we will have official wiimote and nunchuck support in unity for prototyping soon? in the basic versions?
are you planning on implementing all the motion control recording stuff IN unity (with unity-style straight-forwardness), or is that something you will leave to the dev kit? (guess that’s a naive question, as that’s the big point of this announcement, right?)
@starmanta and sr: We don’t have a full set of technical details to share publicly just yet, but suffice it to say that we’ll have to offer improved controller support in Unity as part of allowing content development for the Wii platform.
Does this mean all versions of Unity will have controller support? I am currently using the DarwiineRemote hack, but I’d love to play around with something much more straightforward. This could really get the community to focus on this combonation as a legitimate Wii prototyping tool. If any particular prototype takes off, those developers could then approach Nintendo with a much more substantial application for their developer kit.
