As some of you may have already heard, there has been another hugely exciting announcement from the Unity3D guys. They announced that they will add the ability to export projects to Flash’s 3D API Molehill.

This is excellent news for Flash developers as the Unity tool is a fantastic environment for building games. Using the Unity tool you will be able to program in either ActionScript 3 or using one Unity’s existing languages such as C#, Boo, or JavaScript.

Flash’s new 3D API, codenamed Molehill, “exposes a very low-level shader-based interface to the graphics hardware. Adobe has decided to focus on that low-level part, and do that really well. The molehill pre-release will not be shipping with a 3D engine, scene building tools, model and animation importers / exporters, physics, lighting or lightmap creation tools, etc.”

The latest information released stated that Unity will be keeping the Unity Player and it will be up to the developer to decide when to target Flash or Unity Players or other platforms like desktop, mobile that are currently available and use the rendering platforms that work best with each (DirectX/OpenGL/OpenGL ES/Molehill… maybe WebGL in the future).

If this works out, it will help to break down the barriers some Unity3D developers may have encountered when it came to getting users to break away from the Flash plugin player and download the Unity Webplayer. I’m sure many of us who have published a Unity3D game to be released via the web have hit this issue. But with the option to utilise the already widely accepted Flash player, it opens up all the Flash portals for Unity developers (and hopefully over time, the Unity Web Player itself will continue to gain more acceptance on the web). It also means Unity can now truly say they are a complete cross-platform developing package. Exciting times…

If you want to read more about this, you can see what the Unity guys themselves had to say. As usual, they have been very open about future developments and have published a useful Q and A here.

Matmi has a long history of breaking new ground in the digital world. Constantly looking for the next big thing. Looking outside the box as it were, developing creative and innovative ways for brands to engage and increase their consumer base.

One of these new development strategies was to use the then newly released Unity3D engine. Matmi were one of the first (if not the first) digital agency to use this fantastic development tool to publish games on the iPad. We were also the first to create a suite of branded games developed in Unity3D which was available on the Android platform. It was called Optathlon; 1 App, 2 games, for free!
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Recently, Unity3D released a list of games available for Android made using their engine and Optathlon is the first on the list (if I havn’t already said so, thanks for that!). Matmi is proud to be associated with such a great development tool and continue to use and push the Unity3D engine to its limits.

One of our more recent games made using Unity3D was Petanque3D. This was our first game to be developed in Unity3D that utilised a multi-player option. It was in the development process of this game in which we discovered a minor issue with Unity3D’s proxy server for which we had to create a work around for.

I mention this not to shine any negativity on the Unity engine, which we love, but to merely demonstrate an example of Matmi pushing the boundries of what is possible.

We are extremely grateful for the support the Unity guys gave us at the time. For the past year, we have been working on some really exciting projects using Unity3D which will be released soon.

To see a current list of games made using Unity3D and published on the Android, click here.