Since we’ve rolled out invitations to our DevKit, we’ve been overwhelmed by the interest of developers and creators to get their hands on the tools. While we’re still in the early stages, we brought in a small number of professional game developers to provide feedback and help us improve the DevKit, to ensure that it’s ready and accessible to every developer. As Unity developers already have a set way of using the editor, we want to make sure that our tools are as easy and intuitive as possible for every developer looking to unlock User Generated Content (UGC) at scale.

With UGC platforms, there’s a technical challenge to serve games on different devices. Dynamically loaded content doesn’t always play well with C# or C++ - so, we had to find our own solution. Initially, developers had to use visual scripting to create their own Experiences with our DevKit. However, visual scripting is usually a hassle for experienced Unity developers. Creating complex gameplay mechanics and systems pushes visual scripting to its limits. While visual scripting is a great tool for learning and suitable for prototypes, it introduced hurdles for building Experiences. 

TypeScript for Gameplay

With these challenges in mind, we wanted a more natural way for people to create Experiences. With our TypeScript implementation, we made it as similar as we could to Unity C#. While there are a handful of TypeScript syntax differences, you’ll find it’s practically the same after learning the nuances. Unity veterans may even find it similar to the long deprecated UnityScript.

While internally testing TypeScript, we saw positive signs that bringing a scripting-based solution really improved the developer’s quality of life. Overall, engineers found it much faster to build games compared to visual scripting, and TypeScript introduced very few new challenges. When we put it into the hands of our community, we were excited to see how easy and accessible developers of every experience level found it.

To push TypeScript to its limits, we invited seasoned developers and Unity content creators Jason Weimann and Joe Sullivan to build some prototypes and see how far it can go. With over two decades of Unity experience combined, and several commercial AAA and indie games under their belt, we knew they’d be some of the best people to try out the feature and share their candid feedback. With rigorous testing, they found room to improve, but overall thought it was a smooth transition from C# to TypeScript! With their feedback, our product and engineering teams are now putting final touches on the TypeScript integration into the DevKit. We can not wait to see what you will build with it. In the meantime, check out the prototypes that Jason and Joe built:   

Are you a developer or creator interested in building with our tools? Find more information about our DevKit HERE today to start building User Generated Content (UGC) at scale.

We’ll also be onsite at Unite 2024 in Barcelona September 18–20, if interested in meeting up with us, please reach out to contact@genies.com