Sep 26, 2024
Our R&D and Developer Relations teams just got back from Unite 2024 in Barcelona, Spain. Unite is Unity’s core conference, unveiling major announcements, showcasing the latest technology, and featuring its top partners. The list of announcements and the latest tech demo were nothing short of amazing! You could feel the excitement that followed the keynote and subsequent technical talks.
What did the community celebrate the most? While the reversal of runtime fees was the biggest buzz, a deeper look under the hood of Unity 6 brought a lot of enthusiasm - a new engine lifecycle, unification of rendering pipelines, tools that maximize CPU and GPU performance, investment in WebGPU, presets of tools that accelerate multiplayer game development, and so much more.
Genies DevKit for Unity Devs
Genies has been utilizing Unity in our creative pipelines for a very long time and with the development of the Genies DevKit, we aim to add value to Unity developers with our avatars and UGC platforms. We’re committed to making our tools accessible to Unity developers, and the future of Unity 6 has exciting potential for how Unity will push our avatar-focused games even further. Some highlights include:
Boosting mobile performance and render quality through the lens of Fantasy Kingdom
Making Multiplayer more accessible in the Megacity Metro demo
While at Unite, our team showcased the Genies DevKit and a work-in-progress Vision Pro demo to a number of Unity Insiders and developers who educate thousands of developers on how to use Unity. We spoke to folks such as CodeMonkey, Samyam, CocoCode, Binary Impact, ToughNutToCrack and UselessGameDev, and here’s what they thought of TypeScript and our Genies.
“The avatars look great! It’s cool that you can contribute assets to customize them.”
“Celebrity avatars could add a lot of value for games that fit their persona.”
“It’s nice how similar TypeScript is! It feels like when Unity had JavaScript. It’s very straightforward.”
On the floor, we connected with various Unity developers to tell them more about our vision of avatar-focused games and how we are building our developer tools on Unity. This sparked excitement among developers, particularly those that are targeting younger players. Traits and Smart Assets were very interesting to game developers - either by creating a game that will never be experienced the same way by any player, and creating new ways that same player can interact with the game! These elements made the Genies Devkit truly unique, and developers were excited by what we’re building here at Genies!
When it came to digging into the BTS of our tools and accessibility for experienced C# game developers, the overwhelming feedback was very positive, especially with our implementation of TypeScript. After a few minutes of interacting with TypeScript, veteran C# developers felt it was very natural to use and were interested to try it out on their own.
Beyond Genies Party
Finally, we gave developers a sneak peak of what our tools look like beyond games. With Genies Camera, people were really excited to use our DevKit in their own experiences, saving time and energy on building their own solution for avatars and characters. It gave additional life to the interoperability of our avatars and how they can be leveraged in other ways. In addition, some developers even played with our demo on the Vision Pro!
Particularly, they had a first look at our autonomous Genies - how they were able to navigate the environment around them, take selfies, and even bring virtual objects like game controllers back to the player. It was a pleasant surprise to have avatars with a mind of their own, even occasionally sitting down at a nearby chair for a break, and we had a lot of fun seeing how users interacted with a Genie in the world! From XR experts to novices, we took a lot of learnings to see how we can make the Vision Pro demo an even more immersive experience in the future and are excited to continue experimenting with it.
While XR development continues into the future, we were glad to see the excitement and interest around all of our tools so far. As we continue to build a universe of Genies, UGC, and Experiences, we’ll only have more to offer!
Are you a developer or creator interested in building with our tools? Find more information about our Tool Kit to start building User Generated Content (UGC) at scale. If you are interested in connecting up with us, please reach out to contact@genies.com.
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