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[ 2022 ]

20 entries
1081|blog.unity.com

How to monetize the 97% of non-payers in your midcore or hardcore game

At Appfest 2022, Noelia Lopez, Blockchain PM and Senior Monetization Manager at Tilting Point, shared her ad monetization strategies for midcore and hardcore mobile games. Read the summary or watch the full video.She kicked off her presentation with the main challenge facing free-to-play games: less than 3% of gamers actually pay for in-app purchases. But, Noelia explains, just because 97% of users aren’t paying, doesn’t mean you can’t monetize them.The pillars of monetizationAs Noelia explains, many hardcore and midcore game developers are concerned that ad monetization may negatively affect retention and/or revenue. She’s heard them say that:“paying users will churn if they see ads”“in-app ads might cannibalize in-app purchase revenue”“ads attract low-quality players or decrease the quality of the game”But, according to Noelia, none of these concerns are true - in fact, it just means these developers aren’t implementing their ad placements the right way (or, as she puts it, “you aren’t doing your job well enough!”).The roadmap of ad implementationSo, how can you monetize with ads in a way that promotes revenue growth and [tooltip term="user-engagement"]engagement[/tooltip]? Follow a roadmap, implementing placements throughout the development lifecycle, from prototyping, soft launch, global launch, and finally live ops.PrototypingMany developers think the prototyping stage of the game is too early to begin thinking about ad monetization, and would rather focus on other in-game features - but in fact, Noelia says it's critical to begin here.That’s because during the prototyping phase, your entire studio is conducting the necessary market research to understand your competition - making it a critical time to also understand the monetization strategies your competitors use and the strategies you’d like to adopt.From here, conceptualize putting these placements into your game and how much revenue they could bring. Understanding each ad placement’s revenue potential will help you prioritize which placements to focus on first. By getting started this early, you can also encourage the product team to prioritize placements and align on your exact strategy.Noelia emphasizes the importance of conceptualization, or mentally preparing yourself and your team for an ad placement, even if there’s no space for it in that moment. You can start preparing by asking yourself: where exactly a placement should go, what it looks like, and what else it needs, like a tutorial.Soft launchAfter prototyping, it’s time for the soft launch, or the testing phase. Noelia broke this phase down into three parts: integration, goal setting, and testing.First comes your ad placements. This starts with integrating ad networks - whichever ones you find perform best - and a mediation platform. The best ads for hardcore games are rewarded videos and offerwalls.In the next stage, you want to always consider your goals - like fill rate, boosting LTV, and finding the balance between in-app ads and in-app purchases that maximizes revenue. As she explains, there’s no need to push for CPMs, or make a complex waterfall because soft launches often run in countries that tend to have lower impressions. That’s why it’s important to focus on fill rate, so you understand your engagement and impressions per day, and that your fill rate is good.As for tests, Noelia suggests conducting multiple tests for your ads - it’s important to test the most challenging ads, or the ones that might cannibalize in-app purchases, affect retention, etc. As you determine your game economy, this is also the time to test the ideal reward amount you want to give - increasing or decreasing it accordingly. Even after launch, you should continually be testing and optimizing to ensure the highest performance.Global launchNext comes the global launch - time to finally monitor how your in-app ads are performing. Noelia recommends viewing the metrics of all your ad placements, like engagement and ads per [tooltip term="daily-active-users"]DAU[/tooltip], on one page so you can see which perform best. The ad engagement rate for hardcore games, according to Noelia, hovers around 60%, ads per DAU ranges from 0-3, and ad revenue can get up to 15%. The goal is to have a 95% fill rate, to ensure there’s the highest opportunity possible to serve impressions.To drive home her point, Noelia shared successful examples of placement strategies from her games, like Warhammer: Chaos and Conquest. For example, they offer a welcome package of hard currency every time a user logs on, which boosts players to get started in the game and keep playing. To get non-paying hardcore users to experiment with your game’s ads, she also recommends using offerwall ads - which also helped increase Warhammer’s engagement rate.Live operationsFinally comes the live ops, or the post launch period, where you should be adjusting your ad placements to optimize performance. Before making any adjustments it’s important to be mindful that these changes don’t impact users’ ability to engage with ads.The live ops period can even be an opportunity to increase revenue. For example, if you establish a leaderboard to incentivize non-paying players, you can use ad placements as “tickets” for getting in. Due to increased competition with non-paying users, paying users can also be motivated to invest more to stay on top.Ultimately, ads are a major asset to monetizing your midcore or hardcore game, but placement strategies can only succeed with the right amount of monitoring and optimizing - even from the initial stages of your game’s development.

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1082|blog.unity.com

Making VR education accessible to the next generation of creators

Virtual reality (VR) is a game changer, and it’s here to stay. No longer a tech novelty or niche hobby, VR is rapidly shifting how we design, create, and share everything from cars and buildings to games and films.Around the world, industries of all sorts are realizing VR’s potential and creating exciting new career paths for tomorrow’s workforce. In fact, PWC estimates that 23 million jobs will involve AR and VR globally by 2030, augmenting the many roles already available today.As use cases expand, so does demand for VR talent. However, unequal access to equipment and educator training leaves many institutions struggling to prepare students for the VR boom’s emergent careers.This year, Unity and Meta Immersive Learning partnered to help educators and institutions overcome these challenges. Read on to learn more.Virtual reality is predicted to grow 170% globally in the next 10 years, but educators and students eager to dive into VR today can often find it hard to get started.One reason for this is the wide disparity in institutional funding. VR relies on hardware and software that can be prohibitively expensive to acquire. At a time when many secondary and post-secondary institutions are systemically underfunded, students from lower-income backgrounds who attend these schools are less likely to have access to the tools needed to develop their VR skills.Securing the right equipment is only half the battle. In order to provide high-quality VR education, instructors also need access to training and resources so they can teach with confidence. VR is a new frontier for many educators just as it is for their students, so resources need to cater to both types of learners to achieve the best outcomes.To address these barriers, Unity and Meta Immersive Learning worked together to design the Create with VR Grant program, which aims to reduce the VR learning gap by:1. Increasing access to the hardware and software needed to create and consume VR content2. Increasing educator preparation and offering resources for teaching VR creationVR headset distributionThis spring, Meta Quest 2 VR headsets were made available to secondary and post-secondary education institutions that applied to the grant program. Applications were selected based on the applicant institutions’ current and future plans for teaching VR, as well as the demographic makeup of their student bodies and their unique challenges related to accessing funding.Educator trainingIn concert with the distribution of VR headsets, the Create with VR for Educators professional development training opened for registration in April 2022, offering a crash course in technical skills and pedagogical approaches for teaching VR effectively.School representatives, educators, IT administrators, and lab leaders of all skill levels were encouraged to sign up for the training, which consists of live, online sessions supplemented by self-paced learning and virtual office hours.“The Create with VR Grant bridges the digital divide, affording meaningful interactions and experiences with VR for our students. Whether they are creators, gamers, or engaged in immersive learning, the Create with VR Grant allows us to integrate VR/AR/XR lessons across disciplines and programs. This access builds technical literacy and inspires innovation. We are excited about what is now possible.” – Jenny Hanson, Director, Film & New Media and Online and Blended Learning Pedagogies, Augsburg UniversityBy jointly addressing access to hardware and educator preparation, the grant program aims to put high-quality VR education within reach for teachers and students who might otherwise miss out.Seven months after the partnership announcement, the Create with VR Grant program has already helped thousands of learners and educators take their first steps into the exciting world of virtual reality creation – and we’re just getting started. As of November 2022, the program has:Distributed more than 5,300 Meta Quest 2 VR headsets to more than 300 education institutions across the United States, the majority of which teach real-time 3D creation and cater predominantly to underserved students.Provided more than 10,700 students with access to essential VR hardware.Welcomed more than 3,000 secondary and post-secondary educators from around the world into the Create with VR for Educators training program.“The Create with VR program made a tremendous difference in how we approach teaching VR. We used to share one headset in a class of 20 students. Now, each of our students gets to keep a headset for the duration of a semester. This means more opportunities for full immersion in VR and more time spent on creating meaningful experiences.” – Wojciech Lorenc, Chair, Mass Communication Department, Sam Houston State UniversityUnity and Meta are proud to be contributing to a VR-ready workforce. With the right combination of tools, professional development, and teaching content, educators will be able to successfully build their curricula and prepare themselves to empower tomorrow’s creators.“We’re incredibly humbled and excited to hear about the impact that the Create with VR Grant program has had on schools and communities around the country. It has always been our mission to equip educators with the tools needed to prepare students to compete in the job market of tomorrow, and we wholeheartedly believe that when given opportunities like this, we’ll see students flourish.”– Jessica Lindl, Vice President, Social Impact, Unity“My students used to be thrilled to surf on YouTube – now they make videos. They were happy to play Fruit Ninja on their laptops – now they make their own games and animations. They love VR, but never contemplated being able to create in 3D or virtual worlds until now.” – Darlene Bowman, Founder, AusomeTech IndustriesVR and AR have the potential to add $1.5 trillion to the global economy by 2030, and today’s learners deserve access to the training they’ll need to reap the benefits of the immersive technology boom. We encourage you to join Unity and Meta on our shared mission to make VR education accessible to all.Ready to get started? Sign in to Unity Learn to access on-demand Create with VR for Educators sessions that will help you prepare to teach, and dive into our community on Discord to connect with fellow educators leveraging Unity for VR around the world.

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1083|blog.unity.com

The hyper-casual gaming industry: Past, present, and future

Since coming onto the scene just a few years ago, hyper-casual games have experienced an exponential surge in growth. From Q1 2017 to Q2 2021, for example, the share of voice of hyper-casual installs among all total US mobile game installs grew from a few percentage points to 40%. Where this category emerged from, its position now, and its likely path in the future can help you understand how to take advantage of its success and prepare for impending industry shifts - no matter what genre your games are.To provide these insights, Nadav Ashkenazy, SVP & GM Supersonic, shares his take on the hyper-casual genre and its past, present, and future. Catch his full presentation from AppFest at the end of this article and keep reading for a comprehensive overview of the state of hyper-casual.The past: Evolution of the hyper-casual industryTracing back the hyper-casual genre to 2013, this is the year Flappy Bird was published. It was the first game to show off hyper-casual characteristics, like short levels and simple, accessible gameplay.From 2013-2016, most hyper-casual games scaled with cross-promotion campaigns and organic installs - a shift that you can learn more about in Omer Kaplan’s Gamefest presentation. Then in 2017, developers managed to grow hyper-casual games just like other genres - using paid user acquisition. Despite their low LTV compared to casual or mid-core games, hyper-casual games proved they could be profitable at scale. As a sustainable business model for growing hyper-casual games emerged, more publishers began focusing on this genre and the market became more competitive.Over the next few years - and particularly after 2017 - sub-genres within hyper-casual emerged. For example, 2019 saw the rise of the ASMR hyper-casual games and 2021 was the year of TikTok-based concepts.As these games evolved, the depth of the content grew, too. The first hyper-casual games were on an endless loop, focusing on simple gameplay that repeated itself. The rise of sub-genres and new hyper-casual concepts introduced more complex level structures, a larger amount of content, and new ways to progress. Additionally, meta features, like providing skins as rewards for progressing instead of as a default monetization approach, added another layer of complexity and depth to the core game loop.With the evolution of hyper-casual games, the processes of developing, monetizing, and marketing them improved, too - as a result, the entire business model evolved further:Development: Faster development time, better-quality execution, and more accurate marketability prediction tools and approachesMonetization: Deeper meta, more in-app purchase and rewarded video monetization opportunities, late retention and LTV optimizations, greater variety of A/B tests UA: Predict LTV up to day 180, bid granularly based on user quality, and access enhanced creative optimization capabilitiesThe present: Hyper-casual games boost growth in overall mobile marketToday, the hyper-casual market earns $2-2.5 billion in revenue and achieves approximately 17 billion installs per year - about 1.8 billion of which come from the US. This amount of revenue and scale fuels growth in the larger mobile market, indicated by the fact that as hyper-casual installs increase, non hyper-casual installs do, too.This comes down to the fact that as hyper-casual games became popular, more non hyper-casual titles relied on hyper-casual supply for their UA campaigns, rather than social media channels. In fact, about 20% of the installs for casual and midcore games on SDK networks now come from ads displayed in hyper-casual games and 51% of apps advertising in hyper-casual games are IAP-based titles. Meanwhile, hyper-casual advertisers represent 30% of the video ads shown on SDK networks - more than any other genre, indicating their importance in the market.As the success of non hyper-casual games becomes more intertwined with that of hyper-casual games, the growth of hyper-casual becomes fundamental to the growth of the overall mobile market - these install and advertising numbers show that it’s not just correlation, it’s causation.The future: Hyper-casual is here to stay, with a twistLooking to the future of the hyper-casual industry, we can break it down into two main themes:Short-form entertainment will keep user demand for hyper-casual highHybrid-casual games will emerge from the foundations of hyper-casual as a new category Demand for short-form content keeps attracting hyper-casual usersThe demand for short-form, snackable entertainment is higher than ever - just look at the popularity of TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. This is precisely the type of content that hyper-casual games provide and why they’ll continue to grow in popularity well into the future. The execution level of these games is also increasing and the ad experience is improving, which is further helping to attract and retain users.The demand for short-form, snackable entertainment is higher than ever, which is precisely what hyper-casual games provide.However, as costs rise and LTV will need to increase with it, a new category will emerge alongside hyper-casual: hybrid-casual.The rise of hybrid-casualThe hybrid-casual genre maintains the fundamentals of traditional hyper-casual games, including:Quick prototypingSimple and engaging gameplayEmphasis on high marketabilityShort sessions And it evolves upon these foundations by introducing deeper gameplay, a greater reliance on IAPs, and more advanced LiveOps. With their hybrid monetization strategy, these games get the best of both worlds:Ad monetization for quick, high-converting revenueIn-game purchases for higher retention and LTVAs the hyper-casual genre evolves with the market, expect its growth only to increase and continue driving forward the larger mobile industry.

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1084|blog.unity.com

How to immerse your players through effective UI and game design

In an excerpt from the e-book, User interface design and implementation, veteran game designer Christo Nobbs examines the interplay between UI and game design.Our e-book, User interface design and implementation, illustrates how UI artists and designers can build better interfaces in Unity. The guide covers workflows for the two UI systems available in Unity, but the primary focus is on Unity UI Toolkit for Unity 2021 LTS and beyond. Christo Nobbs, the game designer who was also a major contributor to The Unity game designer playbook, shares a section that he provided for this latest guide on how UI and game design can create rich immersion to keep your players captivated.Successful games are immersive. Whether it’s a VR simulation or mobile role-playing game (RPG), a great game transports us to a different world.Immersion requires a delicate balance of UI and game design. The UI needs to be functional – but within the confines of the game’s art direction and overall identity. The trick is using the right UI for the right situation.Should you show an onscreen icon when a player picks up an item or defeats an enemy, or is that too distracting? Could a misplaced pop-up take the viewer out of the action? These are the kinds of questions you’ll need to consider as a UI designer and artist in the larger context of your game.One current trend is diegetic UI. Today’s game players inherently recognize traditional extra-diegetic UIs, such as health bars or menu screens, as conventions of the medium. They’re artificial devices plastered on the “fourth wall” to communicate with the user. But diegetic UIs, conversely, embed themselves into the story and narrative. They make parts of the game world function as a user interface.Imagine a game character that pulls out an empty weapon magazine in a scripted Timeline sequence. That animation can replace a head-up display (HUD)-based ammo counter.The Dead Space series is often cited as a prime example of diegetic interface. Here, the player dons a sci-fi survival suit, which motivates the game’s UI. The suit’s holographic display projects in-game statistics and inventory, as well as colored lights on its spine that double as a health indicator. The result is a built-in UI seamlessly integrated into the story.In iRacing by iRacing.com Motorsport Simulations, realistic in-car dashboard indicators show damage, which also affects the car’s handling. The player understands there’s something wrong with the vehicle through audio and visual cues, rather than an explicitly flashing vignette or HUD icon.On the flip side, if a game is tooimmersive, the designer can build an “out.” A horror game can give the player a “safe word” with a pause button. This intentionally breaks immersion if scenes become too intense.Experienced designers understand that the UI must fit with the game’s identity. The interface needs to be clean, readable, and appropriate for the situation. With today’s hardware, you can realize advanced UIs that support the story you are trying to tell.At the other end of the spectrum, competitive games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, or CS:GO, Overwatch, and League of Legends depend on UIs that gather information. They use HUDs that must be efficient and assist in gameplay. Diegetic interfaces are less appropriate here. Breaking that fourth wall can actually make for a better game.Since the players have a keen awareness that they are participating in a planned experience, the interface helps them assess the “playing field” – remaining time, team rosters, vitals, minimaps, etc. In some ways, this reflects a sporting event, where the broadcast UI updates its spectators.Whether they’re showing team positions or illuminating players through walls, these UIs have the effect of enhancing strategy and tactics. They can also build suspense for the player and heighten the experience. Thanks to the UI, being a spectator after losing an online match can sometimes be as entertaining as playing.In World of Tanks, the spatial UI elements appear above each player’s tank to relay information about teammates and enemies; things like their name, tier, health, and tank icon. The HUD point bar, navigation elements, and minimap all share a clean and direct visual language.By working with your designer, you can better understand the game’s UI needs. Gameplay is a balance between challenging your players and sharpening their skills. Ideally, this will pass through the Flow channel (see the chart below).Tilt too far to one side and you risk boring your players. To alleviate that, reduce UI elements and increase the challenge level. Then you can force the player to puzzle through the gameplay without too much assistance.Making the game too difficult, on the other hand, can result in anxiety. In this case, adding UIs can lessen gameplay confusion and get your target complexity back on track.Think of UI as a design device meant to steer your game into this Flow channel. An interface shouldn’t waste the viewer’s time. It should clearly communicate its content (e.g., load out, health, etc.), but nothing else. Your designer will likely go through numerous iterations as the product evolves into its shippable form. Let the players – and the gameplay – work out the rest.Tip: UI text You might want to use less text in your interfaces to improve their focus. Small adjustments to icons, fonts, and layout can all impact game pacing. Less text, where appropriate, can also make it easier to localize your game.For more UI text tips, see Joseph Humfrey’s 2018 GDC talk, Designing text UX for effortless reading.Interface designers today have a vast library of game applications to learn from. You can explore them through the Game UI Database. This massive, searchable site allows you to filter by HUD element, type, style, and feature, among other categories. Use it to pore over hundreds of published games and study their in-game menus and screens.Another great resource is Interface in Game. It features video clips of UI elements you can browse. Use this database to search a wide range of titles by platform and genre. Need to polish up some visual effects or UI details? You’re likely to find a reference here.As you examine more game interfaces, you’ll begin to perceive patterns, especially by genre. In a first-person shooter (FPS), for example, we expect to see the health stats at the bottom of the screen. It’s almost an established convention, since so many applications have done it this way.When designing a UI, it’s important to capture the genre’s visual language. If you’re building an RPG, look at how other RPGs handle inventories, skill trees, leveling up, etc. Make something that players are already familiar with, so they can jump right into the gameplay with an understanding of the established style.UI design patterns aren’t random. They’ve evolved over time through a sort of collaborative effort. Designers have already figured out what works, and new designs are simply building on an existing game canon. Learn from these past design decisions. You’ll not only save yourself time, but appease your players as well, who will be expecting certain patterns and visuals in the game.For more information on UI design patterns, read Best practices for designing an effective user interface by Edd Coates, a senior UI artist from Double Eleven.UI Toolkit sample – Dragon Crashers is a demo available to download for free from the Unity Asset Store. This sample demonstrates how you can leverage UI Toolkit for your own applications, and involves a full-featured interface over a slice of the 2D project Dragon Crashers, a mini RPG, using the Unity 2021 LTS UI Toolkit workflow at runtime.You can find more advanced e-books for Unity creators on our How-to hub.

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1085|blog.unity.com

How Aiming used Tapjoy offerwall to boost engagement rate by 80%

Aiming Inc. is a Japan-based game developer responsible for hits like Dragon Quest Tact and CARAVAN STORIES. They wanted to bring in more revenue from their newest hit, Charast Magical Academy a spin-off app of the hit game "CARAVAN STORIES, but had never used an ad monetization model - so the ironSource team helped them get started.ironSource’s Yusuke Toyoshima and Shuichiro Mine sat down with Aiming, to learn all about why they chose ironSource rewarded video and the Tapjoy offerwall, what they learned, and how they managed to boost their engagement rate 80% in the process.Choosing to work with ironSourceMine: This was the company’s first time using ad monetization, right?Saito: Yes. Aiming has a stance that when we see good market trends, we want to adopt and test it by ourselves - so it was only natural to start monetizing with ads. Originally, our company specialized in midcore games, but there were already many competing apps in the market. To generate a stable source of revenue, we decided to develop a hybrid revenue model (in-app purchase and ads) based on "CARAVAN STORIES," which already has a large fan base.Mine: Now you’re monetizing with ironSource and using Tapjoy’s offerwall - why did you decide to go with us?Sakaino: This was our first time integrating ads into our app, so we needed a platform that offered extensive support and a full suite of products. We compared companies from all over the globe, but ironSource was the only one completely that fulfilled our needs.Yusuke: We're glad you chose us! Sakaino: We felt the support immediately - the ironSource quickly responded and drafted financial projections for us.Mine: Publishers who integrate ads in their apps for the first time often don’t have enough information about performance benchmarks. Since ironSource has experience across all game genres in Japan and globally, we can provide our customers with practical ad monetization plans.Sakaino: There were other local options with good products for early-stage companies, but we wanted to get as much operational know-how as possible. That's why we chose ironSource - they offer a variety of report data with a UI that allows us to intuitively understand what’s important at first glance. There was a strong connection between Aiming’s attitude of "challenge new trends and accumulate know-how" and ironSource's push to "provide actionable data for publishers."Mine: At ironSource, we care about providing actionable data. In the long run, we think it is very important to understand the factors behind fluctuations - not be overwhelmed by the ups and downs of CPMs. Ad revenue is always important, but what’s most important for publishers is the success of the game itself. We provide data in a format and UI that every publisher can understand - not just the specific person in chargePerforming beyond expectationYusuke: How was the integration process?Sakaino: It took about two weeks to develop and integrate rewarded video and offerwall into our game. Since the dashboard was easy to understand, even for beginners, we were able to issue and set up placements in one day.Suzuki: From the planning phase, everyone on the team had a shared strategy of how to put ads into our game - so I think it went really smoothly.Mine: I feel that your monetization and game management teams work seamlessly together. For many publishers, this can be challenging - different teams usually have different goals and opinions.Sakaino: Since I joined the project, from the game planning phase to leading ad monetization, I think everyone, including the development team, shared a common goal.Suzuki: It may seem unusual to have someone in charge of ad monetization during the planning phase. Normally people tend to give higher priority to their own department, so perhaps our company's strength is the way that each department can share and coordinate all goals.Yusuke: How was the ad revenue performance?Sakaino: The result was much better than we expected. eCPM for ironSource rewarded videos was more than double our original estimation, and engagement rate reached 80% - even though our original estimation was 65%.Mine: Since the players are mainly from "CARAVAN STORIES," the user quality may be different from the other casual game players. If your game has been around for a while and has a certain income level, eCPM might be higher as a result.Sakaino: I think that’s right.Suzuki: Since the game story is a prequel about the lives of popular characters, fans are highly motivated to play.Mine: It's a successful app strategy for using IP (intellectual property).Sakaino: Tapjoy’s offerwall also performed better than we originally expected. Especially in the beginning, it performed better than the rewarded videos.Yusuke: Since Offerwall provides bigger rewards than rewarded videos, it’s particularly compatible with games that have many users who are willing to pay.Saito: In particular, Android has good KPI compatibility with the offerwall. Android users usually have a lower retention rate, but the offerwall increased revenue and stabilized it.Showing ads to domestic and global usersMine: Did you get any negative user feedback about ads?Sakaino: I don't think there were any noticeably negative reactions.Mine: The key to user-initiated ads like rewarded videos and offerwall is motivating the users to see the ads. "Charast Magical Academy" was designed to use ad monetization from the start, so I think it shows ads to users in the best way possible.Suzuki: Since we set the right rewards for both the offerwall and rewarded video, users connect with the ads and feel satisfied with them.Saito: The rewards we offer are valuable to users. To ensure that users who want to receive rewards don’t miss them, we added badges to places where there are ads that have not yet been seen, and added a jump button that auto-scrolls to that point. However, it seems that some new users thought that they couldn't progress in the game without clearing the ads, so now we only display badges for users who have progressed to a certain stage.Yusuke: I see.Saito: Impressions grew about 2.5x the normal rate during the offerwall's currency sale, but when we displayed the badge on the game screen and directed users to the ad page, it grew 8x - a huge revenue increase.Yusuke: It's a device that tells users that an offerwall event is currently being held.Sakaino: Also, Charast Magical Academy is only available on Japan’s app store, but some overseas fans download and play it. Thanks to the Tapjoy offerwall’s global support, it’s been great to be able to show global ads and rewards to overseas users.Yusuke: Global support is the Tapjoy offerwall's strength. There is no need to separate campaigns, and global ads are automatically displayed for access from overseas, to accommodate overseas users. Also, the offerwall is optimized with an algorithm to automatically display ads that users are interested in on the top of the list, so publishers can maximize their revenue without spending too much time and effort.Continuing to use ad monetization modelsMine: What are your plans for the future?Sakaino: We are satisfied with ironSource’s usability and profitability, and will continue to use both their rewarded video and the Tapjoy offerwall. For the offerwall, thanks to their global support and compatibility with Apple/Google’s regulations - we’re sticking with Tapjoy.Yusuke: That's great news for us.Saito: We plan to continue releasing games with an ad revenue model. Thanks to our new know-how from Charast Magical Academy, I'm including ads in all the proposals for our new games. Since it generates additional revenue and doesn’t discourage in-app purchases, there’s no reason to not use it.Sakaino: In the future, it would be nice to have a verification function that can segment users according to their in-app purchase status and level of loyalty, and optimize ads accordingly.Thank you to Mr. Sakaino, Mr. Suzuki, and Mr. Saito for participating in the interview. And congratulations on your half anniversary!

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1086|blog.unity.com

What’s new for Prefabs in 2022.2?

It’s been a while since the Scene Management team has shared an update on Prefabs. During the last few releases, and after fixing a large number of bugs you’ve reported (thank you!), we’ve made several improvements to the Prefab system. Let’s take a look at each improvement coming in 2022.2 – now available in beta – and how these updates can benefit you.You can now replace the Prefab Asset for a Prefab instance that exists either in a scene or nested inside other Prefabs. This feature will keep the Prefab instance position, rotation, and scale in the scene, but merge the contents from the new Prefab Asset, all while retaining as many overrides and references as possible via name-based matching (by default). More specifically:The Inspector for a Prefab instance has a new Object Field that can be used for replacing the Prefab Asset.The Hierarchy has Context Menus that can similarly replace the Prefab Asset of the instance.Finally, a plain GameObject can be converted to a Prefab instance through the Context Menu in the Hierarchy, or by dragging and dropping with the Ctrl/Cmd modifier key.This functionality is not only available in the UI, but as with most features we build, it has an API that allows you to manage how objects are matched, as well as how Overrides should be treated. See PrefabUtility.ReplacePrefabAssetOfPrefabInstanceand PrefabUtility.ConvertToPrefabInstance.One of the most requested improvements has been the ability to reorder added GameObjects and components. “Added GameObjects and components” refers to the GameObjects and components that are not part of a Prefab instance, but are added to the Prefab instance in a scene or inside a Variant or Nested Prefab. So as of 2022.1, it is possible to reorder the added GameObjects by drag and drop – both among themselves and between GameObjects belonging to the Prefab instance. Getting this feature ready has required a major refactoring of the Undo system.If you want to reorder added GameObjects from an Editor script, it is simply a matter of setting the sibling index on the Transform of the added GameObject. The ability to reorder added components in the Inspector is included in 2022.2. There is no public API for reordering components.The last thing we needed to achieve full feature parity between GameObjects and components was the ability to delete GameObjects from Prefab instances as an Override. Deleting GameObjects as Overrides, an option available in 2022.2, ensures that once you’ve deleted a GameObject, the usual workflows for reverting from/applying to a Prefab Asset works as you’d expect.When it comes to an Editor script, use Object.DestroyImmediate to destroy Prefab instance objects and record the destruction as an Override stored in the scene file.Users often ask what the Variant inheritance tree looks like for a specific Prefab Asset. In 2022.2, we added the Prefab Family pop-up to the Inspector. The content of the pop-up is dependent on the selected Prefab Asset in the Project Browser. After selecting a Prefab Asset and opening the Prefab Family pop-up, the Editor lists all the ancestors of the current Prefab, as well as all the immediate children.In addition to queries about the inheritance tree, users have often asked how they can get rid of unused Overrides stored in a scene but never accessed (because the property has been removed from a script). In the worst case, such properties might reference assets that are then pulled into the final build, taking up space on the storage device and in memory – but never used.Overrides are now flagged as unused for:Null target objectsUnknown Property Paths (which are not subject to scripted FormerlySerializedAsAttribute usage)Removed componentsRemoved GameObjectsChanged array dimensions (e.g., materials array)When selecting one or more Prefab instances in the Hierarchy and opening the Overrides drop-down, the Editor now shows whether there are unused Overrides. You can then remove them from the scene using the new Unused Overrides drop-down.Moreover, you can remove all unused Overrides in a scene through the Hierarchy’s Scene Context Menu or via the Context Menu for an arbitrary selection of Prefab instances.We do not automatically remove unused Overrides. After all, the reason for their existence cannot be inferred. Removing a property from a script or deleting an asset should not automatically remove unused Overrides as you might subsequently wish to undo the removal and have the Overrides restored.In case you’re wondering: “Why do I still have Overrides on my Prefab instance after pressing ‘Apply All’?” The answer is that those Overrides simply can’t be applied to the Prefab Asset. Most commonly, such Overrides are references to other objects in the scene that cannot be referenced from the Prefab Asset. Overrides that are not typically applicable are now highlighted by a dark blue bar in the Inspector. These cannot be applied; only reverted.You can now change the default behavior when opening Prefab Mode to In Isolation instead of In Context. Go to Editor Preferences > General > Default Prefab Mode to make this change.Now, with 2022.2, Undo is recorded as a single Undo operation when exiting Prefab Mode. This results in all changes made to the Prefab being reverted if you perform an Undo after leaving Prefab Mode.Over the course of multiple releases, the error handling and reporting during scene load (and Prefab load in Prefab Mode) has substantially improved, and will now indicate which Prefabs the errors are related to and/or the GUID for missing Prefabs. In fact, the way we handle missing Prefabs’ assets during scene loading is safer and more stable than before.In an effort to further improve error handling and avoid introducing bad data into your project, we’ve added a Broken Prefab Asset Type, which will be produced by the Prefab Importer when errors that cannot be rectified are encountered.The most common case is when a Prefab Variant has lost its parent Prefab, perhaps because it was deleted. In this case, we can’t produce a meaningful Prefab Variant, so a Broken Prefab Asset is created instead. This new asset will show information about what is wrong in the Inspector when selected in the Project Browser. If it’s a case of a missing Prefab parent, then the GUID of the missing Prefab is shown. Alternatively, if it’s a chain of Prefab Variants that is broken, you can go up the chain through the Inspector until you find the Variant with the missing parent.The concept of Disconnected Prefab instances no longer exists as of 2022.1. We still support loading Disconnected Prefab instances, but when the Editor encounters them during scene loading, the Disconnected Prefab instances are stripped of all their Prefab information and become regular GameObjects.As mentioned, our team has fixed a series of bugs you’ve graciously reported to us over time. Some of them derive from the original Prefab system, but many have only become apparent upon the introduction of our improved Prefabs.Today, we are confident you will enjoy the stability of the latest Prefab system. We hope you will find it smooth and efficient to work with.Have more Prefab-related questions or comments? Join us in the forums to share your feedback.

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1087|blog.unity.com

Perception 1.0: Expanding the toolbox for synthetic data

Synthetic data in Unity now includes synthetic humans and homes in this major release of our open-source tools.The success of increasingly ambitious machine learning (ML)-driven computer vision (CV) systems depends on high volumes of richly annotated data. Since performance of these systems depends so much on the data, gathering better data is often the best way to improve model performance. Collecting and annotating real data is so expensive and time consuming, however, that a data-centric approach is not feasible for many projects. To that end, thousands of teams have turned to Unity for building synthetic data for computer vision.Today we are making a big leap forward in synthetic data with a major update to our open-source tools for building synthetic data, which we are calling Perception 1.0. A new Synthetic Humans package gives you diverse, poseable, randomizable, and deterministic 3D humans. The new Synthetic Homes dataset generator provides photorealistic home interior data for scene understanding and object detection. Additionally, the Perception package has been updated with depth and normal outputs, path tracing support, and Python visualization and analysis tools.With this expanded suite of tools, we want to enable you to build high-quality synthetic data faster than ever.We are excited to announce the release of Unity Synthetic Humans, a 3D person generator built from the ground up for human-centric CV synthetic data. Thousands of hours went into creating the content using a mix of scanning, simulation, and 3D artistry. Today, we are sharing all of this work for free under an academic use open-source license.Unlike other digital humans, which provide small variations on a handful of base character models, Synthetic Humans create massive diversity by combining libraries of hair styles, fully anonymized facial and ethnic generation, body models, and clothing. As a result, each generated human is anonymous and unique – instead of generating a specific person, you control the sampling distributions on axes of randomization, including ethnicity, height, weight, and age. For example, a dataset with 20% teenagers, 45% young adults, and 35% middle-aged and older, can be specified in the generation parameters.Key features:Wide range of diversity in age, body type, and skin toneRich labeling, including body keypoints and clothing segmentationFully rigged and skinned bodies and clothes compatible with the Unity Animation SystemPlacement randomization in 3D environments with collision avoidanceWe are also releasing Synthetic Homes, a large-scale dataset of synthetic home interiors, and the associated dataset generator. Use cases for in-home CV are innumerable, but gathering diverse home interior data in the real world is notoriously difficult due to privacy concerns and data collection restrictions. Synthetic Homes aims to accelerate model training for such applications by providing a large dataset of varied home interiors with accurate and rich labeling, as well as a configurable dataset generator.We include a variety of randomizations to maximize diversity. These include materials, furniture type and configuration, sunlight angle and temperature, day/night switching, interior lighting temperature, camera angles, clutter, skybox, door and curtain animations, and more. The dataset generator gives you control over many of these elements, enabling you to tune them to your liking.Interior lighting in homes is complex and intentional, making photorealism especially important. We used Unity’s multi-bounce path tracing to accomplish physically accurate global illumination and reflections. This accuracy can help bridge the so called “Sim2Real gap”, improving a model’s ability to perform well in the real world after training on synthetic data.The Synthetic Homes project includes a 100,000 image dataset, a configurable dataset generator, and a notebook for data analysis. The dataset includes rich labels for semantic and instance segmentation, bounding boxes, depth, and normals. It also includes environmental information like occlusion percentage and camera position. To enable you to iterate on the data we also provide the dataset generator, where you can tweak parameters like camera positioning, blur randomization, and image size.The Perception package powers synthetic data in the Unity Editor. We are broadly expanding the package in this release to support new CV tasks, increase quality, and speed up dataset development. New Perception features include:A conveyor belt sample illustrates the capture of video datasets with randomized object spawning and physics.Ray tracing integration provides highly photorealistic images using physically-based multi-bounce lighting with minimal setup.Occlusion labeler calculates how much of an object is occluded by other parts of the scene and how much is offscreen. This information makes it possible to filter out annotations on highly occluded objects.Depth and normal labelers capture rendering layers that can be used for new tasks or give models additional information to perform better predictions.Transparency and two-sided geometry support enables pixel perfect labeling of plants in agriculture and outdoor environments.We also want to give the community more impact on Perception, so alongside this release we are also opening up the package to accept contributions from the community.Data exploration and analysis are critical to iterating quickly on synthetic data, and we want to make that as easy as possible. With this update we are introducing a new dataset format called SOLO, designed for large-scale image datasets extensible to new types of annotations and metrics. SOLO datasets are separated on disk by frame, enabling distributed dataset generation and processing.In tandem with the SOLO format we are releasing pysolotools, a new open-source python package that provides utilities to work with the SOLO format. The pysolotools Python package provides an iterator interface that allows you to easily work with SOLO data on a frame-by-frame basis. It also includes a framework to easily retrieve common dataset statistics universal to most CV problems such as object counts, size distributions, and heatmaps. Finally, with pysolotools it is easy to write custom scripts to convert from SOLO into your needed data format. Even easier, pysolotools comes with pre-built converters to some popular formats, including COCO.Finally, we recognize that it is important to be able to visually verify the data that was created. pysolotools-fiftyone is an integration with the Voxel FiftyOne viewer to allow you to visually inspect SOLO datasets.You can learn more about building synthetic data on Unity’s Computer Vision hub, including tutorials, case studies, and links to all of the content and examples.Synthetic data for machine learning is a growing, fast-moving field. Connect with the community and with us on the Computer Vision forums, where you can share questions and ideas.

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1088|blog.unity.com

Man vs. Machine: 3 ways you can impact growth

At Appfest 2022, ironSource’s Maytal Shaul, Anna Popereko, and Yuval Lotan walked through 3 ways you can impact growth in the heavily automated App Economy - including tips for custom product pages, ad placement strategy, and A/B tests. Read the summary or watch the video below.In the mobile app industry, automation has been a growing force - improving performance for both user acquisition and monetization. But as Maytal, VP Business Growth at ironSource explains, automation is not a threat to manual control. In fact, to get to the best performance, man and machine should work together.Here are 3 areas where app and game companies can utilize this control and have the most impact.Spend more time optimizing on ad strategy and placementsYuval Lotan, ironSource’s Head of Platform Growth, kicked off the session with some important findings - optimizing placement strategy has significantly higher growth potential than optimizing waterfalls, up to 400% in fact. But surveying LevelPlay customers showed a disconnect in time allocation, with most studios investing the majority of their time into areas with the least growth potential.So why do studios tend to invest less in placement strategy? There are three main reasons: risk, team structure, and data accessibility.The retention riskNaturally, changing your ad placement strategy can be riskier than changing your waterfall - since it can affect retention, playtime and in-app purchases while optimizing your waterfall won’t. But for those same reasons, it can also be much more beneficial. According to ironSource research, users who engage with rewarded video have much higher retention rates and are much more likely to make in-app purchases. That increase in performance makes it a risk worth taking.Team structureTo best optimize your ad strategy, you need an expert, or a team of experts, who understand what your users need and how they respond to different ad units. But that can be difficult when your studio’s structure isn’t built for it.It can be tricky, for example, to collaborate on placement strategy when the monetization manager, product manager, and game designer, all sit under different teams with different goals. One might prioritize in-app purchase revenue while the other prioritizes ad revenue.That leaves you with three options:- Make changes to your company structure, if needed- Hire a dedicated person for this role, like we did at ironSource (more tips by her later)- Outsource to an agency, like ironSource’s game design consultancy Data transparencyMany studios also hesitate to invest in their placement strategy because it’s difficult to get transparency into what success looks like. Here are some of Yuval’s tips:First you need to know what KPIs to look out for. Start with engagement rate, or the percentage of users watching your ads - which is the best way to evaluate your growth potential because it’s proportional to your revenue. Additionally, pay attention to impressions per engaged user and impressions per DAU.Next, find out your category’s benchmark from your mediation partner - if you have a clear target, it’s much easier to define goals. For example, one RPG game compared their KPIs to the benchmarks and saw their rewarded video engagement rate was low but impressions/engaged user was high. From this, they understood that their ads were delivering good value to their users, but the traffic driver wasn't accessible enough for them to find it. In fact, when Yuval’s team built recommendations for this game, they calculated the game had a growth potential of more than 40%, because they estimated they could reach the genre’s median engagement rate. Eventually, this game boosted engagement rate by 60% - all while keeping retention stable.Following Yuval’s call to spend more time optimizing placements, Anna Poperko, ironSource’s in-house Game Design Consultant, shared four tips on how to do just that.Data is kingTo fully understand how users are engaging with a traffic driver, Anna recommends comparing KPIs (engagement rate, impressions/DEU, etc.) rather than viewing them in isolation - this way, you get greater context for players’ behavior. Let’s say one placement has a very low engagement rate but very high impressions per/engaged user - you can conclude that players don’t notice this placement often, but those who do find it very valuable.Understanding your players’ motivationsTo monetize players, it’s essential to first understand them and what they need. Gamers are commonly split into standard motivational groups - mastery, achievement, creativity, and more. If, for example, you know your players are motivated by achievement, you can match their motivations to a placement strategy that suits their needs - like offering a rewarded video to help when they fail.Know your competitorsTo maximize your ad placement strategy, it’s always worthwhile to learn from similar games to know exactly what makes your competition succeed. Playing those games is an opportunity to compare and understand their user flow. Do they have more or fewer placements? Where are their placements located? Does their app address the same user motivations as yours? See what gaps you can fill in your placement strategy - every insight is an opportunity, and there’s always room for improvement.Get inspired by other genresBeyond competitors, Anna recommended getting inspired by other successful genres that lean on similar player motivations. For example, Anna worked with a first-person shooter game that never updated the items in their store - losing engagement from players. Inspired by racing games that have stores which refresh monthly, the shooter game decided to refresh their store items more often - and revenue quickly increased. Even though the genres were vastly different, they both had “achieving” player motivations in common.Utilizing custom product pagesIn addition to optimizing placements, Maytal covered another area for growth: Apple’s custom product pages, a product of iOS 15 which has huge potential to boost IPM and conversion rate. 15%-43% increase in IPM, 8%-37% increase in CVR, and 7%-40% increase in eCPM, to be exact. It works by connecting custom versions of an app’s App Store landing page to specific creatives.Looking at the ironSource network, more than 40% of the spend is running with Apple’s custom product pages - and 90% of the advertisers utilizing custom product pages are running their UA through ironSource ROAS optimizer. From that, we understand that automating their bid strategy gives them more time to focus on their creatives and product page experience.As Maytal explained, there’s a reason why and how custom product pages boost IPM and conversion rate. Basically, they add an extra layer of optimization to the user journey - either towards your audience or your creatives. By optimizing custom product pages toward your audience, you get an additional opportunity to focus on language and localization, unique holidays, etc. Meanwhile, by optimizing towards creative elements, by adding screenshots, previews, similar colors, character, and other elements to match popular creatives, you get to build a better bridge between the product page and the creative that sent them there..In fact, when Pocket Gems saw one creative outperforming the rest, they created a custom product page to include that creative’s theme and ran it on the ironSource network. After a successful A/B test, they implemented the new page into their main campaign, and their IPM boosted by 16% as a result. Learn how they did it with ironSource.Applying A/B testingA/B testing is another key strategy to optimize both user acquisition and monetization.In fact, there’s a direct correlation between studios automating monetization by adopting in-app bidding and running A/B tests.By A/B testing monetization, you can measure the impact of any in-game change without hurting KPIs. It also helps predict ARPU and retention uplifts, while giving a clear window into users’ behavior.If you suspect that a change, even a small one - can boost your revenue or scale, it’s always worth finding out. In fact, among LevelPlay customers who A/B test - in 62% of cases, the B group wins - those who applied the new change saw their LTV grow by 7%. These changes might include adding/updating bidding networks, testing different ad placements (capping, pacing, rewards), and banner refreshment rate - all of which have the biggest impact on LTV.To run A/B tests successfully, Maytal recommends:- Challenging existing strategies you have - user behavior in a game is always changing - Testing a wide cohort of users to see the A/B tests impact on all audiences - Looking at both overall and granular results to better understand that the change will impact all groups positively- Testing everything - everything has potential to be optimizedSimultaneously, Maytal suggests:- Avoiding running tests that are too long in order to not risk hurting KPIs- In order to always pinpoint what is affecting results, don’t run test different test versions simultaneouslyUltimately, while the automation tools we have have great potential to increase performance, there is always room for manual optimization - we just have to find the best places to do it.

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1089|blog.unity.com

Games Focus: Creating and operating connected games with multiplayer networking

This is the eighth blog in our Games Focus series, which highlights key product development initiatives for the year ahead and beyond. In this installment, we cover the status, upcoming release plans, and future vision for Unity Multiplayer Networking.Hi there, my name’s Kiki Saintonge and I’m a product manager on the multiplayer team – the one focused on delivering Unity’s Netcode for GameObjects solution.I’ve been at Unity for about a year, but I’ve been a hobbyist and indie Unity developer since 2013. My passion lies in games, particularly playing the inspiring things y’all make. I’m pretty excited to chat about our multiplayer solutions in this post today, especially since so many of you have voiced the need and desire to have a more complete and accessible solution to multiplayer development. We’re closer than you think.Let’s be honest: Making multiplayer games can be really hard, from designing the mechanics to implementing and testing. You have to account for so much – latency, packet loss, handling scene management, what should or shouldn’t be sent over the network – much of which is difficult to track or simulate. Even our third-party networking solutions need third- (fourth?) party tools just to see what the heck is going on.Building a complete networking system for your game should be just like the game itself: unique and refined to fit your game’s experience.With that in mind, we wanted to build a netcode solution that’s flexible enough to accommodate every core aspect of your multiplayer game, while also making it easier for you to use third-party tools or services if you need to. This is the fundamental goal of our netcode solutions.It’s also important to keep in mind that with multiplayer development comes services and scale, two things you might not have thought about in the context of single player or co-op. Unity Gaming Services is our recently launched platform that includes Game Server Hosting (Multiplay), Matchmaker, Relay, and Lobby services. It was designed to give you all the tools you need to build solid foundations, create engaging player experiences, and drive game growth, all within the same integrated ecosystem.We announced some amazing netcode solution releases this year. Our first major release of Netcode for GameObjects is now available in 2020 and 2021 LTS.This GameObject-based Netcode solution helps you get started building small-scale co-op multiplayer games. However, if you’ve built your experience using DOTS (Entities), we’re also pleased to announce our Netcode for Entities solution coming to the 2022 Tech Stream, which helps you get set up for a larger-scale multiplayer experience. Look for our next post in this series to learn more about that release.These stacks cover a wide foundational start to multiplayer development. Together, they make up one step of many to get you on your feet with multiplayer games. These releases also are focused specifically on critical networking scenarios, like abstracting how to communicate to servers and clients, sending object data across the network, and input handling.This release also supports some essential tools that allow you to track the packet loss, size, and latency of networked objects. Network Profiler is an extension to the Profiler that’s built into the Editor, and Runtime Network Stats Monitor(RNSM) is a customizable lighter-weight “Profiler” view of the network states that can be run on standalone builds for playtests.You can install these tools through our com.unity.multiplayer.tools package in-Editor.All of our Netcode stacks – yes, that includes Entities – are built on top of our Transport layer. This layer is netcode-agnostic and can be utilized with any solution.Unity Transport Protocol (or UTP) extends the user datagram protocol with added support for Unity Relay and extra security using DTLS. This layer works across Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, and all major consoles.We also provide some light network simulation capabilities through our transport package’s Debug Simulator properties. This allows you to throttle or simulate latency or bandwidth issues when testing in-Editor.If you’re looking to get direct access to this lower-level networking library you can install it directly via the com.unity.transportpackage.Although Netcode for GameObjects is relatively new, there are already games being built with it.The wonderful team over at Fika Productions with Team17 are working on a beautifully hand-drawn game, Ship of Fools. It’s a fast-paced multiplayer co-op game of nautical persuasion developed completely in Netcode for GameObjects.We’re constantly looking to cover gaps and demystify what’s happening on the network with multiplayer tooling.Multiplayer Play Mode would be a big first step in making multiplayer development a first-class Editor experience.The goal of this multiplayer tool is to “just work” once you enter play mode. It offers the same experience as the single-player workflow, but now you can have up to four clients running within the same Editor session, each receiving its own console information and able to be differentiated with a network-based tagging system.Network Simulator is another feature we’d like to bring up from the Transport layer and expand into a more fully functional tool with a UI that lets you introduce lag spikes, set ping rates, trigger connections/disconnections at will, and even customize certain networking scenarios to run during playtests.We’re looking at getting our Transport package better integrated with Burst, as well as supporting WebSockets.Having a dedicated server is the core to many multiplayer games, and it comes with the need for more fine-grained control of what kind of headless server you’re building.We’ve begun to investigate the dedicated server workflow. This starts with giving you more control and clarity over which assets you want within a server and which you do not. Essentially, you’re selecting the content you want in your server builds, which saves you time and potentially bandwidth in the long run.Want to see the status of these features and more on Netcode for GameObjects?Check out our multiplayer networking roadmap to see what’s included in 1.0 and what’s in the works for future releases. You can also check out our recent Unite 2022 Roadmap session for an overview across the Unity ecosystem.Creating multiplayer games is not easy, and it’s common to feel overwhelmed when exploring the development of a multiplayer game – even with SDK docs provided.It’s our goal to equip and support you with the tools to build great multiplayer gaming experiences for your players. Part of that promise involves providing not only the foundational networking technology but also the documentation and educational templates, such as Boss Room, you’ll need to understand its application.There are many resources available today that you can use to learn more about Unity multiplayer solutions.Boss Roomis a small-scale cooperative game sample project built with Netcode for GameObjects. It’s designed to be used in its entirety to help you explore the concepts and patterns behind a multiplayer game flow.We’re continuing to develop in-house projects as well, to highlight new features and the general capabilities of what you can do with Netcode for GameObjects.Our latest game is Galactic Kittens, a 2D, multiplayer, playable, open source, co-op shooter.To start, check out these blog posts to learn about Unity’s multiplayer suite:Empower great multiplayer experiences with Relay and LobbyEnter the Boss Room: our new multiplayer sample gameState of disruptive behavior in multiplayer gamesChoosing the right netcode for your gamePlus some amazing resources created by our incredible community:COMPLETE Unity Multiplayer Tutorial (Netcode for Game Objects) | CodeMonkeyHow to: Unity Online Multiplayer | TarodevWe hope you’ll stay engaged with our Games Focus series by giving your feedback. Post your questions and comments for this blog in the multiplayer forum or in this dedicated thread.Visit our Productboard for full details on the roadmap. You’ll need to log in with your Unity ID and accept to use functional cookies. Each card on this interactive board is clickable, giving you more details about each topic while providing you with the option to share your feedback. Click on a card, select the level of importance of the topic to you, add your point of view, and submit. This feedback is then directly routed to the proper product teams.Netcode for GameObjects is a capable netcode solution, but if you’re looking to build something much bigger – think galaxies or multi-server MMOs with thousands of players active at once – you’ll want to stay tuned for the release of our next blog in the Game Focus series, which will be all about how to create larger worlds and richer environments.

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1090|blog.unity.com

You can change the world: Unity for Humanity Grant application tips and inspiration

Following the 2022 Unity for Humanity Summit, we’re looking for social impact creators who are using real-time 3D to make the world a better place. Is that you? If your answer is yes, or even maybe, Unity is awarding funding, technical support, and mentorship to help bring changemaking projects to life in 2023.To help you make the most of this opportunity, we’ve put together a few tips to guide you through the application process. Not sure if you need the support? We also spoke with three past grantees about their experience and how the support has helped them realize their creative vision.1. Lead with your passion.Are you dedicated to making the world a better place? That’s exactly what our judges will be looking for, so try to get that across in your application.2. Keep a record of all of your answers.To avoid potentially losing your hard work, write your submission text in a separate document before entering it into the Typeform application.3. Read the application criteria and questions carefully.There are no trick questions – we’re transparent about the projects that are eligible and the judging criteria we’ll be using, so make sure your application includes all the required information to improve your chance of being selected.For more guidance, watch our session on grant application tips from the 2021 Unity for Humanity Summit.To make sure all applicants have as much information and context as possible, we make our judging criteria clear. All projects must be impact-driven – meaning that they have measurable impact goals and/or calls to action – and encompass social, healthcare, education, humanitarian, and/or environmental issues. Projects must also align with at least one of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals.When reviewing grant applications, we consider inclusion, impact, viability, and vision:Inclusion – Inclusive storytelling is at the heart of the Unity for Humanity program. Does your project reflect a diversity of experiences and backgrounds? Does it have a natural connection to the community and audience being represented or served through the work? Does your application demonstrate that you are thinking about future audiences and distribution of the work in an inclusive way?Vision – Is there a strong motivation for creating the work? Does your project express a unique perspective? Does it reflect a strong sense of compassion for humanity?Impact – Does your project have measurable impact goals and calls to action? Is your project aligned with at least one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals?Viability – Does your team have a realistic plan of execution for the production and distribution of the project so that it can achieve the greatest impact? Is it realistic in scope?For more detailed information on applying, read our Unity for Humanity FAQ. If your project’s timeline doesn’t align with this year’s application period, you can pre-register for next year’s grant to receive inspiration, tips, and grant news.We spoke with three past Unity for Humanity grantees to learn about the impact receiving the grant has had on the development of their project.Love Death Design, creators of Gone to Water / Ido al Agua, an immersive documentary that brings first-hand accounts of environmental injustice in Los Angeles, Tongva Land, into a virtual space of protest.AnythingEverything, creators of Powers of X, an immersive film exploring our planet’s environmental fragility relative to the effects of global consumption and man-made climate breakdown.Presencias, creators of Origen, a series of virtual, digital and real-world experiences that reveal ancestral stories through nature.Q: What inspired you to create a social impact project?Love Death Design, creators of Gone to Water / Ido al Agua – New media can be leveraged as a profoundly impactful mode of storytelling: we can protest in virtual spaces, we can employ new technologies to demand sustainable future architectures.“New media can be leveraged as a profoundly impactful mode of storytelling.” – Love Death Design, creators of Gone to Water / Ido al Agua“Gone to Water” is a term that describes the process by which an oil well becomes unproductive and therefore unprofitable, eventually filling with water. We chose to apply for UFH support to create this immersive documentary on urban oil extraction and its community health impacts on Tongva Land – in South Los Angeles because for those most affected by environmental racism, it is a matter of survival. Los Angeles is considered a microcosm of the world for its rich cultural contributions but it is also a snapshot of environmental injustices faced by BIPOC and low-income communities throughout the world.AnythingEverything, creators of Powers of X – We are incredibly excited about using emerging technologies like XR to enable new formats for storytelling and create positive change, particularly when it comes to education about the climate crisis. With Powers Of X, we saw a powerful opportunity to harness VR and AR's unique ability to convey scale in order to reveal the impact we each have on the planet in a much more tangible way.Presencias, creators of Origen – Having been in contact with stories, memories of this land’s origin, led us to think that collaborating with storytellers from the various territories (the Amazon, the Andes and northwestern Argentina) to jointly create an experience in first person, interwoven by meaningful interactions, could result In a significant project capable of touching many hearts.“The project has driven an initiative to replant 20 different species in the mid-Ucayali region of the Amazon Rainforest.” – Presencias, creators of OrigenSomething incredible happened from the production phase of Origen, thanks to the collaborative networks it has woven, the project has driven an initiative to replant 20 different species in the mid-Ucayali region of the Amazon Rainforest. We understood that a project with these characteristics transcends what it can generate in the public once released. It is since its construction, through its dialogue with reality, that starts to generate an impact on multiple levels.Q: How did you come up with the idea for your project?Presencias, creators of Origen – The story of this project began more than ten years ago thanks to the bond with an incredible Mapuche descendant woman, Celeste, a great friend I’ve known since I was 19 (she’s also a script supervisor in the VR experience). Since then, in successive trips that I’ve made in Latin America, Celeste asked me to take presents of great symbolic value to her friends, guardians of other territories. It was revolutionary for me to be in contact with these women, their stories and this powerful network. Eventually these experiences became the opportunity to collectively create Origen.Q: What impact has the Unity for Humanity Grant had on your project?Love Death Design, creators of Gone to Water / Ido al Agua – Support from the Unity for Humanity Grant enabled our small creative design studio to produce a large scale project, collaborating with a wide spectrum of community members, activists and artists across South Los Angeles – Tongva Land. We were able to afford hardware to create the work, time and space to produce it, and the ability to compensate all our contributors – as well as offer free community workshops. As this is a pilot project for our artist-led studio, Love Death Design, having the support to realize the work in scope with our vision has been impactful and has greatly lifted our presence as under-represented artists and voices in the XR community.We are so grateful to have the support to co-create this work with community members, activists, and artists on the frontlines of environmental injustice and hope that this piece provokes those who experience it to consider their privilege and position, and join us in demanding the end of neighborhood drilling.“UFH was instrumental in helping us get our project off the ground and taking our concept from abstract idea to a tangible prototype.” – AnythingEverything, creators of Powers of XAnythingEverything, creators of Powers of X – We have used the UFH funding in order to conduct research around the subject matter, refine the conceptual experience, and most importantly to develop a functioning prototype which demonstrates the format and can be used in order to raise follow-on funding for the full production. We have successfully completed the prototype and we could not have done it if it wasn't for the help, resources, and support we received from Unity For Humanity.Presencias, creators of Origen – For the development of the experience and to implement the first steps of the replanting initiative that emerged as a result of the process of creating the firsts chapters of Origen.Receiving the grant was what made possible for this first chapter of Origen to come off paper and become a reality. It also gave us the freedom to create with so much autonomy, it allowed us to delve into the artisanal and interdisciplinary part of the project, which was crucial to respect its identity.The premiere of the first chapter, “The Journey to the Heart of the Amazon Rainforest,” is approaching and we are starting the pre-production of chapter two – “The Journey to the Andes” – which keeps us working and very excited for what is to come.The Unity for Humanity 2023 Grant is open for applications until 11:59 pm PT on December 9, 2022. Join our Social Impact creator Discord to speak to the Unity for Humanity team, ask questions, and meet other creators. Apply for the grant today.

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1091|blog.unity.com

Advanced Editor scripting hacks to save you time, part 2

I’m back for part two! If you missed the first installment of my advanced Editor scripting hacks, check it out here. This two-part article is designed to walk you through advanced Editor tips for improving workflows so that your next project runs smoother than your last.Each hack is based on a demonstrative prototype I set up – similar to an RTS – where the units of one team automatically attack enemy buildings and other units. For a refresher, here’s the initial build prototype:In the previous article, I shared best practices on how to import and set up the art assets in the project. Now let’s start using those assets in the game, while saving as much time as possible.Let’s begin by unpacking the game’s elements. When setting up the elements of a game, we often encounter the following scenario:On one hand, we have Prefabs that come from the art team – be it a Prefab generated by the FBX Importer, or a Prefab that has been carefully set up with all the appropriate materials and animations, adding props to the Hierarchy, etc. To use this Prefab in-game, it makes sense to create a Prefab Variant from it and add all the gameplay-related components there. This way, the art team can modify and update the Prefab, and all the changes are reflected immediately in the game. While this approach works if the item only requires a couple of components with simple settings, it can add a lot of work if you need to set up something complex from scratch every time.On the other hand, many of the items will have the same components with similar values, like all the Car Prefabs or Prefabs for similar enemies. It makes sense that they’re all Variants of the same base Prefab. That said, this approach is ideal if setting up the art of the Prefab is straightforward (i.e., setting the mesh and its materials).Next, let’s look at how to simplify the setup of gameplay components, so we can quickly add them to our art Prefabs and use them directly in the game.The most common setup I’ve seen for complex elements in a game is having a “main” component (like “enemy,” “pickup,” or “door”) that behaves as an interface to communicate with the object, and a series of small, reusable components that implement the functionality itself; things like “selectable,” “CharacterMovement,” or “UnitHealth,” and Unity built-in components, like renderers and colliders.Some of the components depend on other components in order to work. For instance, the character movement might need a NavMesh agent. That’s why Unity has the RequireComponent attribute ready to define all these dependencies. So if there’s a “main” component for a given type of object, you can use the RequireComponent attribute to add all the components that this type of object needs to have.For example, the units in my prototype have these attributes:Besides setting an easy-to-find location in the AddComponentMenu, include all the extra components it needs. In this case, I added the Locomotion to move around and the AttackComponent to attack other units.Additionally, the base class unit (which is shared with the buildings) has other RequireComponent attributes that are inherited by this class, such as the Health component. With this, I only need to add the Soldier component to a GameObject so that all the other components are added automatically. If I add a new RequireComponent attribute to a component, Unity will update all the existing GameObjects with the new component, which facilitates extending the existing objects.RequireComponent also has a more subtle benefit: If we have “component A” that requires “component B,” then adding A to a GameObject doesn’t just ensure that B is added as well – it actually ensures that B is added before A. This means that when the Reset method is called for component A, component B will already exist and we’ll readily have access to it. This enables us to set references to the components, register persistent UnityEvents, and anything else we need to do to set up the object. By combining the RequireComponent attribute and the Reset method, we can fully set up the object by adding a single component.The main drawback of the method shown above is that, if we decide to change a value, we will need to change it for every object manually. And if all the setup is done through code, it becomes difficult for designers to modify it.In the previous article, we looked at how to use AssetPostprocessor for adding dependencies and modifying objects at import time. Now let’s use this to enforce some values in our Prefabs.To make it easier for designers to modify those values, we will read the values from a Prefab. Doing so allows the designers to easily modify that Prefab to change the values for the entire project.If you’re writing Editor code, you can copy the values from a component in an object to another by taking advantage of the Preset class.Create a preset from the original component and apply it to the other component(s) like this:As it stands, it will override all the values in the Prefab, but this most probably isn’t what we want it to do. Instead, copy only some values, while keeping the rest intact. To do this, use another override of the Preset.ApplyTo that takes a list of the properties it must apply. Of course, we could easily create a hardcoded list of the properties we want to override, which would work fine for most projects, but let’s see how to make this completely generic.Basically, I created a base Prefab with all the components, and then created a Variant to use as a template. Then I decided what values to apply from the list of overrides in the Variant.To get the overrides, use PrefabUtility.GetPropertyModifications. This provides you with all the overrides in the entire Prefab, so filter only the ones necessary to target this component. Something to keep in mind here is that the target of the modification is the component of the base Prefab – not the component of the Variant – so we need to get the reference to it by using GetCorrespondingObjectFromSource:Now this will apply all overrides of the template to our Prefabs. The only detail left is that the template might be a Variant of a Variant, and we will want to apply the overrides from that Variant as well.To do this, we only need to make this recursive:Next, let’s find the template for our Prefabs. Ideally, we will want to use different templates for different types of objects. One efficient way of doing this is by placing the templates in the same folder as the objects we want to apply them to.Look for an object named Template.prefab in the same folder as our Prefab. If we can’t find it, we will look in the parent folder recursively:At this point, we have the ability to modify the template Prefab, and all the changes will be reflected in the Prefabs in that folder, even though they aren’t Variants of the template. In this example, I changed the default player color (the color used when the unit isn’t attached to any player). Notice how it updates all the objects:When balancing games, all the stats you’ll need to adjust are spread across various components, stored in one Prefab or ScriptableObject for every character. This makes the process of adjusting details rather slow.A common way to make balancing easier is by using spreadsheets. They can be very handy as they bring all the data together, and you can use formulas to automatically calculate some of the additional data. But entering this data into Unity manually can be painfully long.That’s where the spreadsheets come in. They can be exported to simple formats like CSV(.csv) or TSV(.tsv), which is exactly what ScriptedImporters are for. Below is a screen capture of the stats for the units in the prototype:The code for this is pretty simple: Create a ScriptableObject with all the stats for a unit, then you can read the file. For every row of the table, create an instance of the ScriptableObject and fill it with the data for that row.Finally, add all the ScriptableObjects to the imported asset by using the context. We also need to add a main asset, which I just set to an empty TextAsset (as we don’t really use the main asset for anything here).This works for both buildings and units, but you should check which one you’re importing as units will have many more stats.With this complete, there are now some ScriptableObjects that contain all of the data from the spreadsheet.The generated ScriptableObjects are ready to be used in the game as needed. You can also use the PrefabPostprocessor that was set up earlier.In the OnPostprocessPrefab method, we have the capacity to load this asset and use its data to fill the parameters of the components automatically. Even more, if you set a dependency to this data asset, the Prefabs will be reimported every time you modify the data, keeping everything up to date automatically.When trying to create awesome levels, it’s crucial to be able to change and test things quickly, making small adjustments and trying again. That’s why fast iteration times and reducing the steps needed to start testing are so important.One of the first things that we think of when it comes to iteration times in Unity is the Domain Reload. The Domain Reload is relevant in two key situations: after compiling code in order to load the new dynamically linked libraries (DLLs), and when entering and exiting Play Mode. Domain Reload that comes with compiling can’t be avoided, but you do have the option of disabling reloads related to Play Mode in Project Settings > Editor > Enter Play Mode Settings.Disabling the Domain Reload when entering Play Mode can cause some issues if your code isn’t prepared for it, with the most usual issue being that static variables aren’t reset after playing. If your code can work with this disabled, go for it. For this prototype, Domain Reload is disabled, so you can enter Play Mode almost instantaneously.A separate issue with iteration times has to do with recalculating data that is required in order to play. This often involves selecting some components and clicking on buttons to trigger the recalculations. For example, in this prototype, there is a TeamController for each team within the scene. This controller has a list of all the enemy buildings so that it can send the units to attack them. In order to fill this data automatically, use the IProcessSceneWithReport interface. This interface is called for the scenes on two different occasions: during builds and when loading a scene in Play Mode. With it comes the opportunity to create, destroy, and modify any object you want. Note, however, that these changes will only affect Builds and Play Mode.It is in this callback that the controllers are created and the list of buildings is set. Thanks to this, there is no need to do anything manually. The controllers with an updated list of buildings will be there when play starts, and the list will be updated with the changes we’ve made.For the prototype, a utility method was set up that allows you to get all the instances of a component in a scene. You can use this to get all the buildings:The rest of the process is somewhat trivial: Get all the buildings, get all the teams that the buildings belong to, and create a controller for every team with a list of enemy buildings.Besides the scene being edited, you also need to load other scenes in order to play (i.e., a scene with the managers, with the UI, etc.) This can take up valuable time. In the case of the prototype, the Canvas with the healthbars is in a different scene called InGameUI.An effective way of working with this is by adding a component to the scene with a list of the scenes that need to be loaded along with it. If you load those scenes synchronously in the Awake method, the scene will be loaded and all of its Awake methods will be invoked at that point. So by the time the Start method is called, you can be sure that all the scenes are loaded and initialized, which gives you access to the data in them, such as manager singletons.Remember that you might have some of the scenes open when you enter Play Mode, so it’s important to check whether the scene is already loaded before loading it:Throughout parts one and two of this article, I’ve shown you how to leverage some of the lesser known features that Unity has to offer. Everything outlined is just a fraction of what can be done, but I hope that you’ll find these hacks useful for your next project, or – at the very least – interesting.The assets used to create the prototype can be found for free in the Asset Store:Skeletons: Toon RTS Units – Undead DemoKnights: Toon RTS Units – DemoTowers: Awesome Stylized Mage TowerIf you’d like to discuss this two-parter, or share your ideas after reading it, head on over to our Scripting forum. I’m signing off for now but you can still connect with me on Twitter at @CaballolD. Be sure to stay tuned for future technical blogs from other Unity developers as part of the ongoing Tech from the Trenches series.

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1092|blog.unity.com

Unity and ironSource merge to simplify launching and growing great mobile games

Today, we announced that our merger with ironSource is complete. It's a big day for Unity, and we’re excited because ironSource’s team and complementary capabilities will help us deliver even more ways to help game developers bring their vision to life:The leading end-to-end platform – The combination of Unity and ironSource is transformational in that it will give mobile game developers the tools they need at each stage of their development journey: from building, publishing, and operating mobile games to monetizing them, if they choose to, and growing their player base across multiple channels.Integrating creation and growth – It’s not just about having all of these tools in one place but also about connecting them so that they work together to simplify the whole development process. Together with ironSource, we can transform the linear mobile game development process into a deeply connected and interactive one. By integrating ironSource's products into Unity's platform, developers will be able to get real-world player and market feedback earlier in the development process, which means that they can learn what players really want, make better games and be on track for a more successful game businesses.When we announced our intent to merge with ironSource in July, we heard a lot of our community members sharing some concerns and I’d like to address the main ones directly:“Is Unity no longer focused on games?”Helping developers create great games that reach players where they are has always been and will stay at the heart of what we do (read our Games Focus blog series to learn more). Our goal is to make the tools that make it easier for developers to realize their vision – and that includes supporting that vision with resources to help them turn their games into sustainable businesses, if and when they choose to do so, which ironSource will help us do as they, too, are heavily focused on games.“Is Unity now only focused on mobile game developers?”While mobile is, of course, a huge platform for games, with 70% of all top mobile games globally made with Unity, we also remain committed to developing features for PCs, consoles, and XR. We want to ensure that all developers, from early learners working on their first game to the largest studios in the world, can rely on us regardless of the platform they choose to deploy their games on.The benefits from the merger with ironSource are, indeed, particularly strong for mobile game developers who choose advertising as their business model. Gamers are a highly engaged audience but only a small minority (less than 2%) utilize in-app purchase in the games they play. Advertising and in-app-purchases are the ways most mobile game developers choose to monetize their games. And most players welcome ads as a way to discover new games to play. This provides developers with the revenue to not only pay the bills, but also fund their growing teams - and build more beautiful games.We know you will have a lot of questions about how Unity will integrate and introduce these products. We are committed to moving quickly and transparently to integrate our technologies to deliver the best tools and services and over the course of the next week will share more about the short-term benefits for mobile game developers in particular.Unity’s mission remains the same: We want Unity to be the best development engine for creators to create what they imagine – no matter what they want to do.Keep an eye here on our blog for more updates about product integration and roadmap over the next few weeks.

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1093|blog.unity.com

At Unite 2022: Machine learning research, persistent worlds, and celebrating creators

On November 1, more than 19,000 members of the Unity community joined us from around the world, both virtually and in-person, for a full day of gamedev inspiration, education, and connection. Following the keynote, attendees were able to experience fellow creators’ projects, participate in expert-led sessions, network with peers, and even attend a first-of-its-kind, multiplatform virtual concert.With over 20 streamed sessions throughout the day and five unique local experiences, here is a roundup of notable highlights from Unite 2022.Senior Machine Learning Developer Florent Bocquelet expanded on a tool and Real-Time Live! Audience Choice Award-winning project that first debuted this summer at SIGGRAPH 2022. The session “Authoring character poses with AI” walked attendees through how the technology – which is not yet available – is being designed to work in the Editor to enable easier creation of natural-looking poses.Benoit Gagnon, a senior software developer, modeled ways for users to handle persistent data in a multiplayer context during the session “Persistent worlds: Managing player and world state.” The technical deep dive also covered PlayerPrefs, CloudSave, and general-purpose DBs, and offered a glimpse at what’s next from Unity Gaming Services.Of the more than 20 virtual sessions, nine featured leading minds from creators like you who use Unity day in and day out to optimize your projects, including:Renaud Forestié, director and Unity Asset Store publisher at More MountainsNic Gomez, senior games designer at AltaFreya Holmér, studio founderBen Hopkins, expert graphics engineer at Owlchemy LabsRohan Jadav, platform engineer at SuperGamingBrandon Jahner, CTO at MalokaManesh Mistry, lead programmer at ustwo GamesErick Passos, SDK lead developer at Photon EngineWe also caught up with creators from Triangle Factory, Vinci Games, and Obsidian Entertainment during the keynote session.Get the inside scoop on the Unite 2022 experiences hosted in five unique locations at Unity offices around the world.After networking and breakfast, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Create Solutions Marc Whitten welcomed the Austin crowd before the global keynote stream. For the rest of the day, attendees had the chance to check out exclusive in-person sessions, global virtual streams, and panels, and chat live with experts at the “Ask the Experts” booth. The day concluded with a fireside chat between Marc Whitten and Jeff Hanks, director of marketing for industries.Kicking off with breakfast burritos, Unity Senior Vice President Peter Moore welcomed a packed crowd at the Brighton office for the Unite 2022 keynote stream. The day continued with enthusiasm as attendees filled rooms to watch session streams, live panels, and roundtable discussions. Topics exclusive to Brighton ranged from understanding your audience from a scientific perspective to how Unity identifies and fixes bugs. Brighton also featured a very popular iiRcade machine and four “Studio Spotlights” featuring local studios who talked about their latest games and how Unity helped bring each to life.At yet another Unity office, Copenhagen guests were also welcomed with breakfast and an introduction from Senior Director of Product Management Andrew Bowell. In addition to its own iiRcade console and chances to check out the Made with Unity games featured in the keynote – Cult of the Lamb, Turbo Golf Racing, and Hyper Dash – attendees were treated to exclusive panel discussions as well as a fireside chat between Head of Marketing Strategy, Analytics, and Insights Deborah-Anna Reznek and Senior Vice President of AI Danny Lange.Despite a rainy day, Montreal welcomed a solid mix of students and teams from mid- to large-sized studios. Luc Barthelet, senior vice president of technology, kicked off the day. Following the keynote stream, participants had their choice of roundtables, panels, and presentations to attend. The Montreal office also hosted 24 Unity Insiders from around the world, including Ireland, the Netherlands, Brighton, Portugal, Vancouver, and Toronto. This group participated in a VIP experience that featured exclusive tracks catered to their areas of interest.The San Francisco experience had a great turnout and offered a choice of three different tracks for attendees, which included breakout focus groups, roundtables with Unity experts, and panel discussions. One such session featured Clive Downie, senior vice president and general manager for Consumer, as he moderated an interactive discussion with Ingrid Lestiyo, senior vice president and general manager for Operate Solutions, and the creators of Ramen VR (pictured below) amid a packed room. Another standout session was CEO John Riccitiello’s fireside chat with indie game developer Thomas Brush. To cap off the memorable day, attendees continued the festivities with a happy hour.It was so great to connect with our Unity community at a Unite event again (for the first time since 2020). Please continue to join us on our journey toward making the world a better place with more creators: connect with us through the forums, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, or Twitch. And keep your eyes peeled in the coming months for on-demand session recordings so you can check out anything you missed.

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1094|openai.com

DALL·E API now available in public beta

Starting today, developers can begin building apps with the DALL·E API.

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1095|blog.unity.com

Metaverse Minute: The versatility of VR featuring Cas and Chary

Who says that virtual reality (VR) is limited to gaming? Not Cas and Chary. Our team had the absolute pleasure of collaborating with the renowned duo on the Unity-sponsored YouTube video, AWESOME things to do in VR that’s NOT gaming.More than virtual reality’s reigning cutest couple, Cas and Chary are deeply passionate about showing how technology can improve our lives today – and shape the future. Here are just a few applications of Unity mentioned in the video that demonstrate how.During Cas and Chary’s segment on how VR can change the way we travel, they explored the Great Pyramids of Giza in Emissive’s Horizon of Khufu. This experience was designed in partnership with Peter Der Manuelian, professor of Egyptology and his team at the Giza Project at Harvard University. On the experience, CEO of Emissive Fabien Barati shared, “We are thrilled by the success of Horizon of Khufu. Both entertaining and educational, it shows how VR can be appealing to a wide audience.”With several years of research and data collected onsite, they managed to produce an immersive VR landscape that allows you to freely roam and discover one of the Seven Wonders of the World. A small group of us at Unity actually had the opportunity to try it at a pop-up in New York City, and we can confirm that it’s as magical as it sounds.“We are thrilled by the success of Horizon of Khufu. Both entertaining and educational, it shows how VR can be appealing to a wide audience.” – Fabien Barati, CEO of EmissiveTo quote Cas in the video, “You want a window that looks out to the universe? Done. You want five TVs instead of one? Done!” That’s where Custom Home Mapper comes in.It takes a one-to-one map of your home and brings it into the metaverse in three simple steps:Trace out the perimeter of your home.Mark out large objects, such as your couch or bed.Set your anchor, and you’re ready to start customizing your home for VR mini golf, or just about anything else you can imagine!The solo developer behind this SideQuest project, Ryan, explains why he created the app: “To help people experience real freedom of movement in VR. It was a joy to try and solve these unique, creative problems of multi-room gameplay and social home interactions.”Ryan acknowledges “The tremendous amount of support received from enthusiastic users who wanted to see the same dream realized… Couldn’t have asked for a more interesting project to keep busy with during Covid lockdowns!”We’ve been fans of Rezzil for a while now and couldn’t wait to introduce the app to Cas and Chary. Rezzil uses a VR headset with both eye- and feet-tracking to register a player’s skill level in a particular sport.Rezzil’s suite of drills helps athletes achieve excellence in specific modalities they need to improve. And it doesn’t end there: Rezzil puts players back into past matches so they can understand where there’s room to improve their performance. Top clubs like Manchester United F.C. and the Atlanta Falcons of the NFL are using the app, and while the team at Rezzil can’t say who, we know that at least five World Cup teams took the app with them to the competition.Our friends at Cause + Christi XR worked with six-time Emmy Award winner, Baobab Studios, to build a custom social VR world for the red carpet premiere of Baba Yaga. Daisy Ridley and Jennifer Hudson brought some star power to the virtual event and even took photos with fans in AltspaceVR.As Cas points out, doing premieres this way is fun and gives anyone with internet access and a headset the chance to join in. That’s our kind of guest list.BraVeR is doing something pretty spectacular. With intentionally designed VR spaces, this team is working to help people overcome their fears. All of the levels and tasks in BraVeR are tested by experts and users alike, and based on proven methods and studies to help people cope with their anxieties. Each of BraVeR’s unique spaces centers on a fear to offer a mutually challenging yet enjoyable experience.In the words of Moshe Radman, CEO of BraVeR, “I saw that there is a huge technological change coming at us and decided to use this change for good. Mental health is a great place to start. As I dug in more and more, I found out that this is an inefficient and overloaded market. But VR can radically help take the load off and make mental health-related solutions more accessible.”“VR can radically help take the load off and make mental health-related solutions more accessible.” – Moshe Radman, CEO of BraVeRWe can’t wait to see how extended reality (XR) will shape the future of product design and prototyping. One of the apps that gets us super excited about this is ShapesXR. Gabriele Romagnoli and his team created a product that’s intuitive to use, even for beginners in the XR space.Visualizing your thoughts with 3D sketching enables you to communicate in a way that isn’t really possible with traditional methods. Safe to say that Cas and Chary are thrilled with the app.“We’ve been in the XR space since 2015 and have seen that creatives still have a hard time contributing their skills and knowledge to this new world. We created ShapesXR with the mission to empower designers and any non-developers to ideate, design, and prototype immersive apps,” states Gabriele Romagnoli, Founder of ShapesXR.“Some of our users call us ‘the Figma for 3D and immersive’ and it is actually very spot on. ShapesXR is, in fact, easy to pick up, and you can mock up interactions in a way that is fully collaborative. We strongly believe that working together and being able to effectively communicate your ideas in real-time is the key to success.”For the construction folk among us, it’s impressive to see how Arkio has made it so much easier to design interiors, sketch buildings, and craft environments with our hands.As Cas says in the video, “It supports the right tools for the industry and it’s really, really powerful.” With Arkio, the only limit is your imagination.Transfr trains people for well-paying careers in high-demand fields. It enables learners to find secure jobs currently available and facilitates their upward mobility thanks to immersive, hands-on VR training.With complete VR courses, tailored to audiences at diverse educational institutions and companies, Transfr puts participants in simulations that teach real-world skills relevant to their career paths. They even include tests that are reviewed by instructors in specific fields. When Cas gave it a try, she had a blast learning about autobody tools.“There is so much undiscovered and underdeveloped talent in our world. These high-potential individuals are often passed over because they lack access to the training needed for well-paying careers at great companies,” says Bharani Rajakumar, CEO of Transfr.“VR allows us to deliver on-the-job training at a massive scale to support the economic development needs of different communities, so that employers get what they want, a highly skilled workforce – and we get what we want, a pathway to upward mobility. By working with everyone in the ecosystem, from customers to technologists, we are creating pathways, from classroom to career, that can help workers and learners access new skills and a better quality of life.”We’d like to see more XR experiences created for younger generations. After all, they hold the future of these technologies.That’s why the Kai XR platform is so exciting. Created by educators, it provides students with the ability to explore the world of immersive tech. Schools, libraries, and extracurricular programs like summer camps across the United States are using the platform to show students what’s possible with XR.According to Kai XR CEO Kai Frazier, “Kai XR works with a wide variety of students ranging from those at juvenile detention centers to charter schools. Some students are expert coders while others don’t know what coding is. From working with a range of experiences, I wanted to create a makerspace that lets all students dive into their imaginations, and doesn’t limit them due to schools lacking the tools or experience to create. All of their ideas are valuable and it’s great to see what they create in our drag-and-drop Metaverse Makerspace, Kai XR Create.”“I wanted to create a makerspace that lets all students dive into their imaginations, and doesn’t limit them due to schools lacking the tools or experience to create.” – Kai Frazier, CEO of Kai XRThe combined forces of Varjo Technologies and Volvo have done some stellar work with Unity. The two companies first came together to create a digital twin of the entire car factory – Volvo’s own metaverse. Engineers and designers can now show each other exactly what they envision in VR with an interactive 3D model.As Cas states in the video, this has resulted in improved collaboration, faster design iteration, and accelerated development. Working together in the metaverse, from start to finish, has been beneficial for Volvo, and it could not have happened without the incredible people at Varjo.And now, it’s time to enjoy more awesome things you can do in VR outside of gaming. Let Cas and Chary take it away.Are you using Unity for something other than games?If you’re using Unity for a unique project, give us a shout on social media.Follow Unity for Digital Twins on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. For more on Unity for Digital Twins, check out our recent demo or our new kickstarter package.

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1096|blog.unity.com

Real-time action: Creators make the world a better place at Unity for Humanity Summit 2022

That’s a wrap on this year’s Unity for Humanity Summit. We’ve pulled together our favorite moments and takeaways in case you weren’t able to make it or just wanted to relive the highlights.During the Summit, we announced that applications for the Unity for Humanity 2023 Grant are open. Submit your social impact project for a share of $500,000 USD in funding, plus technical support and mentorship.We met so many incredible social impact creators using Unity in innovative ways to drive change. If you have a similar project, the Unity for Humanity Grant is open for applications to help support you in making your vision a reality.Grant recipients will receive a bespoke grant from a pool of $500,000 USD, plus mentorship and technical support to help bring their project to life. Your project must be currently in production and align with one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. For application details and criteria, please visit the Unity for Humanity FAQ. Don’t have a prototype ready this year but want to pre-register for next year’s grant? Sign up to be one of the first to hear when the next grant is live.“[Receiving the grant] gave us the freedom to create with so much autonomy.”“Receiving the grant was what made possible for this first chapter of Origen to come off paper and become a reality,” shared Presencias, creators of Origen. “It also gave us the freedom to create with so much autonomy, it allowed us to delve into the artisanal and interdisciplinary part of the project, which was crucial to respect its identity.”Actor and activist Rosario Dawson joined us to share her vision for the future – which she believes is possible thanks to the remarkable potential of technology and the impact of creators.“We used to be all around the fire: the medicine woman, the warrior, the mother, the father, the child, the person who worked with the animals, and the food. Everyone had an equal space around that fire where they came together as a community. And, as industry built up, we started going into that pyramid shape where it was just the few people at the top and all the workers at the bottom,” she shared. “What’s remarkable now, with this technology, is we get to open up that portal, and get that light in our face and be back around the fire again – through our watches and our tablets and our phones.”So why does she have so much faith that technology will change the world? In Dawson’s words,“I know that we’re getting there because this generation is coming in hot. They are looking at the problems that we have perpetuated up until this moment and they are factoring in. They are being so conscious and intentional with what they are making and creating, and that just gives me a lot of hope.”In one session, attendees met students from Spelman College, Urban Arts Partnership, and Generation Pakistan. These remarkable organizations provide STEM education to underserved students, to skill-up more students, provide more career opportunities, and diversify the tech industry.Since its inception, Urban Arts has served more than 250,000 students across 150 New York City public schools. Their mission is to provide students from low-income communities with a high quality education in an industry lacking workforce diversity.Generation is on a mission to transform education-to-employment systems and help prepare, place, and support people into life-changing careers that would otherwise be inaccessible. Unity partners with Generation to run a 3-month training bootcamp in Pakistan, that not only teaches participants Unity skills, but also provides mentorship, employer site visits and support to place them in a career upon graduation.A 2022 graduate of the program, Farwar Bashir, shared, “The course improved my Unity skills, but also focused on our personality and built up our professional skills. It wasn’t just Unity – it was also how to deal with challenges and solutions that we would face in the real-time industry.”“When I came out of the interview room, I had the biggest smile on my face, and I knew in my heart that yes I got the job,” added fellow graduate Humaira Salamat. “I received a call the day after the interview, 'yes you got the job, please come to our office for negotiation of your salary'.”“It wasn’t just Unity – it was also how to deal with challenges and solutions that we would face in the real-time industry.”We heard from a number of creators using Unity to fight climate change and protect the planet. Former Unity for Humanity grant winners shared insights into their projects and gave attendees an update on their progress.For example, Gone to Water is currently in production and has an anticipated release on STEAM VR in February 2023. “Gone to water” is a term that describes the process by which an oil well becomes unproductive and therefore unprofitable, eventually filling with water.According to Cat Ross, designer and researcher for Love Death Design, “We chose to apply for [Unity] support to create this immersive documentary on urban oil extraction and its community health impacts on Tongva Land – in South Los Angeles – because, for those most affected by environmental racism, it is a matter of survival. Los Angeles is considered a microcosm of the world for its rich cultural contributions, but it is also a snapshot of environmental injustices faced by BIPOC and low-income communities throughout the world.”Drop in the Ocean, another grant-winning project, is a 10-minute social VR adventure where audiences hitch a ride on a jellyfish and encounter the mysteries of the deep. Most importantly, participants experience the plastic pollution crisis from the viewpoint of sea life. Read more about this project in a blog from one of the creators.“Through 2023, we will be exploring staging Drop in the Ocean at the most important environmental and climate action conferences and events, as well as supporting Conservation International’s outreach activity,” shared Vision3 Immersive Creator and Producer Adam May.At the “Accessibility Insights for Creators” roundtable we heard from Studio Director of Falling Squirrel Dave Evans, Accessibility Product Manager at Owlchemy Labs Jazmin Cano, and Blind Accessibility Consultant, Gamer, and Developer Lukáš Hosnedl about the importance of creating experiences with accessibility in mind.During this open conversation we listened as experts discussed the future of accessible gaming and how game developers can add features that will ensure their games can be enjoyed by everyone.In the “Create with AR Live” workshop, we were introduced to the latest Unity Learn free online course, Create with AR. This 13-hour, self-paced course will teach you how to create your own AR (augmented reality) face filter app.As we unlock the potential of AR apps, these skills are increasingly growing in demand, so now is a great time to add AR to your Unity skill set.What was your favorite part of this year’s Summit? To keep up with Unity for Humanity year round, visit the program website and sign up to our mailing list for social impact creator news and inspiration.

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1097|blog.unity.com

Unite 2022 Keynote recap

It’s been two years since we’ve hosted a Unite event to gather with our amazing community of game developers. Thanks to you, this year’s Unite is on track to become our most attended ever. If you haven’t had the chance to watch the keynote yet, we’ve got you covered with this spotlight on what was shared.“When we say the world is a better place with more creators in it, we mean that literally,” shared CEO John Riccitiello. “Because creators bring people together. Because we know the joy of creating, and we want more people to experience this joy.”“Now, we know creation is hard,” he continued. “Game creation is especially hard because it involves so many disciplines – from programming to design, art to lighting, character creation to animation, and some serious mastery of technology. Our role at Unity is to make the tools that make it easier for you, as creators, to realize your vision.”Bringing our community together to offer updates and insights into what we’re working on is so important to us. Today’s hybrid event – both virtual and in person within our local communities in Austin, Brighton, Copenhagen, Montréal, and San Francisco – is also an opportunity for us to listen to your feedback so we can ensure we’re building tools and features that meet your needs.Watch the full keynote, or keep reading for a recap of highlights from key areas of focus as we continue to heavily invest in our game engine to help you build, scale, and grow incredible games.DOTS, an acronym for Data-Oriented Technology Stack, is composed of three parts: Entity Component System (or ECS for short), Burst compiler, and the C# Job System. If your game requires massive scale, DOTS is a great alternative to an object-oriented coding framework because it lets you write safe, multithreaded code that can deliver performance gains. Simply put, DOTS enables you to build vast, complex worlds and deliver incredible experiences to your players.As Laurent Gibert, who oversees the development of DOTS and multiplayer technology at Unity, announced, “ECS is finally leaving its experimental phase. That means that with the coming 2022.2 Tech Stream – like any other feature – ECS will be supported for your projects.”Gibert emphasized that you don’t have to choose between data- and object-oriented development: The two can coexist. This means you can solve hard scaling problems while relying on your traditional workflows for everything else.To help you scale up your DOTS skill set more quickly, ECS will include graphics packages, physics capabilities, and Netcode, as well as full documentation, samples, and tutorials.“ECS is finally leaving its experimental phase. That means that with the coming 2022.2 Tech Stream – like any other feature – ECS will be supported for your projects.”Creating great visuals is time consuming, so our team spotlighted a few updates to help you achieve your vision more efficiently in both Universal Render Pipeline (URP) and High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP).“We know that it’s hard to choose a rendering pipeline early in a project,” said Nancy LaRue, a marketing manager for technical artistry tools. “And it can be complicated to switch later on. So we’re working on modifying the render workflow so you’ll be able to use both URP and HDRP in the same project.”The segment highlighted some new tools for URP, including Forward+ rendering and a new Decals offering, that achieve parity and even eclipse what you could achieve with the Built-in Render Pipeline. To highlight URP tools’ effectiveness in production, Hannah Kennedy, art director from Obsidian Entertainment, took to the stage to talk about the studio’s new game Pentiment, launching November 15. Hannah’s team chose Unity and URP to deliver on their project because they needed a flexible approach, right from the start.“We were also able to use URP’s wide range of direct and indirect lighting solutions to quickly achieve the mood and enhance the dramatization of the game,” she said.Next, a demo illustrated an HDRP workflow to help you create dynamic environments using Physically Based Sky, Cloud Layers, Volumetric Fog, Adaptive Probe Volumes, the Volume System, and our incredible new Water System.We closed the graphics segment by celebrating some of the inspiring and jaw-droppingly gorgeous games that you’ve brought to life with Unity over the last few months. Catch the full sizzle below.“We’re working toward an end-to-end solution that covers every aspect of your multiplayer game – from creation to ongoing management of a live experience,” explained senior technical product manager Kiki Saintonge. She also shared what’s upcoming for multiplayer services.Developing and operating multiplayer games is incredibly challenging. We want to make it easier for you to design innovative multiplayer experiences, so we’re improving our Netcode solutions and bringing services like matchmaking and game hosting right into the Editor.To showcase what’s possible, Timothy “Timo” Vanherberghen, founder and CEO of Triangle Factory, joined us onstage. He spoke about the studio’s multiplayer VR games, Hyper Dash and Breachers, both of which leverage our Matchmaker and Game Server Hosting solutions.Timo had this to say about why his studio chose to select services from UGS: “We could have built a solution ourselves, but that would mean spending a lot of time building and maintaining features that have nothing to do with our core gameplay. We’re in this industry to build games, not the systems around them.”Triangle Factory’s next game, Breachers, will be in open alpha later this month.“We’re in this industry to build games, not the systems around them.”Today’s keynote also gave a preview of how we’re simplifying VR development with the XR Interaction Toolkit, including an example from Vinci Games in Blacktop Hoops. We shared the ways we’re making it easier for you to customize your Editor with updates to the UI Toolkit, which is now at full feature parity with IMGUI. The keynote even provided insight into how you can continuously fine-tune and test your live game content from a single platform to boost player satisfaction and reduce churn.Next, we announced the arrival of DirectX 12 in the upcoming Tech Stream 2022.2, as well as the work we’re doing to make our suite of art and VFX tools – including our digital human package, hair system, and puppet-based animation – widely available to you in real-time, so you can use these tools in your games.Unite 2022 continues for the remainder of today, with technical sessions, roadmap deep dives, and more. This content will also be available on-demand later this year, and you can watch the full keynote address below. Last but not least, we hope you’ll join us tomorrow for Unity for Humanity Summit 2022, an inspiring look at how creators are using real-time 3D technology to make the world a better place.

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1098|blog.unity.com

Building your 3 pronged holiday UA strategy: Creatives, offerwall, and on-device advertising

Time spent in apps always peaks during the holiday season. The key to making that uplift work for your user acquisition is tackling it from all angles - from optimizing existing channels to expanding into new ones. That way, you can generate the installs and ROAS you need to start the new year off right.That’s why we invited three ironSource experts to this edition of our Angles of Acquisition webinar series:- Noa Eckstein, Head of Business Operations at ironSource Luna, covered building holiday-themed creatives that spike IPM - Sarah Chafer, VP US Sales at ironSource Sonic, discussed how to set up an offerwall campaign that'll generate record ARPU - Jess Overton, Director of Demand at ironSource Aura, walked through setting up an on-device campaign at a time when everyone's buying new phones Read on for a summary of the webinar or watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvewwdzvVBMConsumer insights during the holidaysTo kick off, Marketing Director at ironSource Lauren Baca set the scene with consumer insights during the holidays pulled from ironSource and M&C Saatchi Performance’s holiday marketing playbook:- 75% of consumers plan on purchasing clothes and footwear as gifts this year, making them the most popular gifts across all generations. - 65% of consumers plan to spend more or the same on holidays gifts this year compared to last year - 28% of consumers plan to start shopping in the fall and 27% of consumers plan to start shopping on Black Friday or Cyber MondayDownload the report for more data and insightsWith a better understanding of how consumers plan to shop and celebrate this season, Lauren passed the mic to our ironSource experts to break down some best practices for optimizing UA - from how to build holiday-themed creatives to making the most of a unique ad unit all the way to how to leverage a time when everyone's buying new phones.How to build holiday-themed creatives that spike IPMNoa explained that while the holiday season feels quite special, the marketing problems you face during the winter months are the same problems you face every other season - you need to find the best content and creatives, you need to optimize key channels, and you need to utilize your data better. The only difference? Your creatives get a holiday makeover.During the holidays, people tend to be their most emotional - it’s a time for nostalgia and thinking about friends and family. This emotion is a key ingredient to building high-IPM creatives - the goal is always to get users to go from seeing a creative to actually feeling something that encourages them to download, and the holidays are a time when that’s even more feasible.So if IPM has the potential to be so high, why wouldn’t you invest in building holiday creatives? Noa covered a few reasons why some studios might choose not to:- Holiday creatives can cost a lot to run and need more resources and attention to build, but may only run for a very short amount of time - Most creatives don’t end up scaling and often fail - it is more challenging to find the winning creative within such a short time period - Users who see a holiday-themed creative may expect to play a holiday-themed game, so you might need to adjust your gameplay or pay closer attention to user quality. - On the flip side, there are tons of data that show why you should invest in building holiday creatives, according to data from the ironSource Luna platform:- IPMs are significantly higher throughout the holiday season due to more engagement in apps and on phones (2021, US, iOS)- In fact, game installs surged 3x during the week of Christmas (2021, US, Facebook)- Advertisers test 2x the amount of creatives during the holidays, which means you don’t want to be left behindLooking deeper, Noa explained that building holiday-themed creatives can have a positive impact on your team and collaboration:- It’s an opportunity to refresh, prevent fatigue, and get creative in a unique way - Holiday elements trigger a lot of emotion leading to higher intent- You can create a really healthy dialogue between your creative team, UA team and product team as everyone works on holiday plansNext, Noa gave us some proof and walked through case studies. First, she presented a game studio that works with ironSource Luna that changed the sword in their playable ad to a Christmas tree, which had a huge impact on IPM during the holidays. It performed so well that the studio chose not to deactivate the creative after the holidays - and it remained the top-performing creative even two months after Christmas day. In another example, the holiday-themed creative was a top performer until the end of April.Last, Noa showed what happened when Luna tested three different Halloween-themed creatives for a game studio. For the first one, the Luna team took an existing high-performing creative and just put a Halloween theme on top of it. For the second one, Luna replaced a mermaid’s head with a pumpkin head and changed the pointer to a witch's hand. Neither of these variations are showing positive results yet - but that may change the closer we get to Halloween! For the third variation, Luna built a creative where the witch is playing the Halloween-themed game, which became one of the most successful creatives for this title and led to a 20% higher D7 ROAS.So how can you find this same success without heavy production?- Use real footage of real people that show pure emotion - Test holiday figures - snowflakes, witches, pumpkins - to spice it up - Give the pointer and buttons a holiday theme, like Santa Many advertisers are taking advantage of this time of year to increase performance, but you need to weigh that against the internal resources you have to build a new set of creatives. There are other ways to optimize your holiday strategy, such as with the offerwall - which leads us to our next angle.How to set up an offerwall campaign that'll generate record ROASNext up, Sarah Chafer discussed best practices for running offerwall campaigns during the holidays. First, she started with a brief background, explaining that the offerwall is a user-initiated, rewarded in app marketplace with three main constituents: developers use the offerwall to grow revenue, user retention, and app engagement, without cannibalizing IAP. Advertisers use the offerwall to reach a unique, quality audience that is looking for a transaction of some sort and will remain highly engaged in the app. Consumers engage with the offerwall for app discovery and brand discovery, all while getting further and deeper into the app they’re already using.So, how does this all work together - how do the advertiser and consumer come together in that moment or transaction? Sarah ran through a few of the most popular offerwall pricing models to help advertisers get campaigns started:Cost per engagement (CPE): Here, advertisers only pay when a user installs an app and completes a specific engagement event. This is all about getting users deeper down the funnel. Ask yourself, what do you want the user to do to remember the app and what would encourage them to use it again?Multi-reward cost per engagement (MR-CPE): In this pricing model, you pay in incremental steps as a user works towards completing a deep engagement event. This way, you can reward the user for completing more actions - not only installing and opening, but installing, opening and downloading a coupon or making a purchaseCost per action (CPA): You’ll pay when a user completes a quiz, action on a website, or purchases from a brand. This is the most common format during the holidays and it can be used in a lot of creative ways. Cost per install (CPI): You’ll pay each time a user installs your app, which is really about getting your app out there in the market and driving app discovery. Surveys: Pay when a user completes a survey to help you better understand user behavior - how they feel, what are their thoughts, what are they into, etc. Next, Sarah dove into best practices for mastering this ad unit during the holidays - saying that the most important thing to keep in mind is timing.There are tons of new devices entering the market - all the major players are releasing the latest versions of their best-selling devices and if you’re an early adopter of technology, you may already have one. Device sales increase heavily starting now and many will end up wrapped up as gifts. Starting with the offerwall now can help you be top of mind as new devices enter homes globally. Second, with holiday shopping starting earlier this year compared to last year according to our report, it’s important to remind users that the holidays are coming and that right now is the time to shop. You can provide this sense of urgency in your messaging, which we will discuss in the next section. Third, level up with currency sales and double down on rewards on key shopping days, like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Consumers will be inclined to engage with an offer that gives them extra rewards. As an advertiser, you can double down on your bid - the reward is higher, the traffic is higher. In fact, we’ve seen around a 35% lift in conversions during previous currency sales. Once the timing is right, how do you get your creative to capture all the great offerwall traffic?Stay competitive with special promotions, also known as currency sales. We know that users are looking for deals - 40% said that rewarded ads influence their purchasing decisions according to our report. Whether you’re offering a sale or special package, get creative and switch it up frequently to stay fresh, unique and competitive. Going back to providing a sense of urgency, it’s important to be reminding users not only to shop but who to shop for. Include “gifting” and “holiday” in your messaging and add holiday-themed graphics to your creatives, which are consistent reminders that the holidays are coming. You can even call out someone in particular with phrases like - “for that someone special in your life,” or “for your pet” to get consumers thinking about their gift lists. The Tapjoy offerwall has a shopping tab, which gives consumers a better understanding of what our advertisers do by highlighting their packaging, merchandising, and best-selling products. Give the shopper an idea of who your brand is and what will be shipped to their home.Overall, the offerwall is an excellent touchpoint to reach high-intent users that will drive high ROAS. If you’re looking to expand your touchpoints even further, on-device advertising is a unique way to take advantage of the new phones entering the market - covered by Jess Overton.Setting up on-device campaigns when everyone's buying new phonesJumping off of Sarah’s point that there are tons of new devices sold, unboxed, and unwrapped this time of year, Jess shared that 51% of consumers plan to give a new device as a gift for the holidays. With each new device, consumers get access to new forms of entertainment - Jess even alluded it to the world’s greatest mall. Ultimately, how consumers decide to interact with their devices is a function of the apps they download and engage with.Jess shared that 95% of users that will be unboxing new devices this Christmas will be downloading apps in the first 48 hours. During those 48 hours, consumers will install 60% of the apps they’ll download for the lifetime of the device. If you look at your device's home screen and ask yourself, “when was the last time you downloaded a bunch of apps?”, it’s probably been a while. That’s the power of capturing a download at device activation.ironSource Aura partners with top device manufacturers and mobile carriers to deliver app discovery experiences directly to users on their devices so you can get your app discovered at key moments during the device lifecycle, whether it’s during device activation on Christmas morning or after a major operating system update. On-device marketing enables dynamic bidding and endless opportunities for optimization, which is largely impossible on traditional preload channels. Being able to meet users at moments when they're ready to discover and experiment with new apps along with first-class optimization capabilities means that on-device marketing is a channel that converts potential users into high-value customers.There are three things to keep in mind about running on-device during the holiday season. First, holiday-ify your creatives. Second, you can reach a range of demographics for your app and price accordingly. Third, sit back and watch that LTV rack up.Holiday-ify your creativesData shows that tailoring your on-device creatives to the audience and the placement can generate a significant uplift in performance. For example, you can add a holiday graphic or theme, such as a Santa hat, to your app icon on the device setup placement. Or you can show real people in the holiday spirit on the full-screen offer placement.Reach a range of demographics and price accordinglySecond, you need to ensure the bid for each demographic. This is especially important during the holidays, because you only get one shot. There’s only one Christmas morning, consumers only unbox your device once, which means you as the advertiser have to get your bids right the first time. So pay attention to price and understand which demographics are most important to your campaign.To paint a better picture, Jess broke down demographics of device activations last Christmas: the Boomer group is slightly less represented, with 15% activating new devices. 29% of activations came from Gen X, 25% from Millennials, and 21% from Gen Z. Bottom line? The on-device channel is a great way to get in front of hard-to-reach demographics, such as the older than 55 group. For Gen Z who are bombarded with ads, the on-device channel cuts through the noise and gives you a way to reach these users in a different mindset.Prepare for long LTVOn-device channels are a much slower burn in terms of LTV and app engagement. When you think about Christmas morning and setting up your new device, you might download a travel app, food delivery app, a few shopping apps, a bunch of games, but you’re not ordering food right away or booking your next trip on Christmas. Ultimately, you’ll see users start to engage more at D14 or D30, and this effect is even more significant during the holiday season. After all, we spend a lot more time on our phones and dabbling with apps.Having a multi-channel approach to your holiday advertising strategy is critical, and being well-informed on how to optimize all of those components is a huge benefit. If you’ve made it this far, you should have all of the best practices you need to drive high-performing creatives, create an offerwall strategy that converts, and leverage a time period high in device activations.

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1099|blog.unity.com

Creepy, cute, compelling: The recipe for smash hit, Cult of the Lamb

Cult of the Lamb was a breakout success this summer, selling more than a million copies in its first week. Through its unique premise, Massive Monster’s dungeon-crawling, base-building, rogue-lite hybrid casts you in the role of a possessed, cult-leading lamb.Your mission? Indoctrinate woodland creatures, perform dark rituals, and hunt down bosses – all to appease an eldritch being, The One Who Waits, and become leader of “the one true cult.” A major factor in the game’s success is its compelling gameplay loop, which reviewers have described as “addictive,” “satisfying,” and even “perfect.”We sat down with Jay Armstrong, Massive Monster’s design director and lead programmer, to discuss how the team chose which genres to combine, what they did to balance a two-genres-in-one-game approach, and their top tips for overcoming challenges to keep development focused.The Massive Monster team – Jay Armstrong, Julian Wilton (creative director), and James “Jimp” Pearmain (art director) – is spread out across Singapore, Australia, and the UK. How did you all meet and start making games together?We all started making Flash games individually. We first met through the Flash game scene, forums, and events. We all worked together on different games, and when Flash games fell away, we decided to team up and make games for desktop and console.The first game that Julian and I created together was called Super Adventure Pals, and almost exactly 10 years later, we released Cult of the Lamb. So the three of us have been collaborating together for a long time.What was your source of inspiration for Cult of the Lamb? How did you develop the idea?Funny enough, the cult stuff didn’t come until much later. The game actually started with the idea of combining the genres of a roguelike with a colony sim/base builder. I noticed that games like RimWorld and Enter the Gungeon created so many interesting emergent narratives – stories that spring out of the game’s mechanics – that made it so everyone’s experience with the game was unique. I was excited about the idea of combining those two genres to create something that would become more than the sum of its parts, so I created a prototype that I planned to show to the other guys at an upcoming PAX.When I took it to Jimp and Julian, they loved it, but we immediately found that it was a really hard game to pitch when talking to publishers. At this point we still hadn’t come up with the cult theme. We knew we had to figure out a way to market the game in one sentence. We needed a player fantasy we could explain easily and that people would immediately understand. It took around nine months of experimenting with different themes before we finally landed on the idea of the cult.Once we had that, everything for the next three years was about making sure we kept hitting the “promise” the game’s theme created. The game had to feel like you were leading a cult, which meant we had to have rituals and sermons. But figuring out how to make those game mechanics took a lot of iteration and experimentation. We got very used to cutting ideas that didn’t achieve that goal, and “listening” to what the game wanted to be. Having a clear goal for what we wanted the experience to be meant we were all on the same page, and it was obvious when something was or wasn’t working.Cult of the Lamb is your first Unity project. Why did you choose Unity to develop it?Yes, Cult of the Lamb is our first Unity project. We chose it because of the great tools it offers for iterating, quick testing, and allowing designers to lay out levels. In the past, we’ve created our own editors, but the tools that are available for Unity and on the Asset Store are such timesavers. We also have the flexibility of building whatever tools we want for ourselves.How did Unity enable you to manage the game’s combination of 2D and 3D assets to create a 2.5D look?One of the reasons we picked the 2.5D look was because we were moving to Unity and it was our first time using a 3D engine. It felt like a waste if we just stuck to normal 2D, so we decided to take advantage of that extra axis!It was great being able to move the sprites around and create faux-3D structures; to use the Editor to decide on the best angles for our characters and the camera.Why did you choose the top-down perspective? What were some challenges you encountered during implementation and how did you solve them?The main problem with our perspective was that we had to keep the camera relatively fixed, which restricted our options for combat and the placement of things in the world. While it is sort of top-down, we had to arrange things so that the important stuff was all at the top/back of the screen. It was fine once we got the hang of it: Creating restrictions forces you to come up with creative solutions.What benefit did Unity’s lighting provide for creating the look of Cult of the Lamb?The lighting is such a big part of what makes Cult of the Lamb look so cool! We had some support from our extremely talented friend Jonathan Swanson, who helped us set up all the lighting. Because of our 2.5D setup, we had to create some custom solutions. But once we got it all up and running, it really elevated the game massively.Did your artists work directly in Unity?Yes, everyone was working directly on the project at once, which saved us huge amounts of time. Having an artist or designer implement something directly is so great. This not only saves the programmers time, it also allows the artist or designer to get it looking exactly how they want it to.Back when we started in Flash, everything had to be implemented into the project by one person, and we’d send assets over email. This created a huge bottleneck. It’s such a relief to be able to put the tools in the hands of talented artists and let them do their thing!How did you iterate on what are essentially two different game concepts, while maintaining the scope of your project?It was definitely a challenge. Cult of the Lamb only works when both sides of the game feed into the other – when one side is broken or not as good as it should be, the whole game falls apart. It really didn’t come together until quite soon before the release. We just kept working as hard as we could and dragged the game kicking and screaming over the finish line.We still have loads of ideas for the game – but it just came to a point where we had to stop adding new stuff and focus on making it as cohesive as possible and the game loop itself as compelling as it could be. That’s where the real magic of the game is. We plan to keep adding more stuff to the game post release.How did you test features as you added them?Everyone on the team would do regular playtests. Later in development, our publisher helped us to connect with a focus group who gave us feedback. Ordinarily we would have exhibited the game to get player feedback, but due to COVID, we were essentially making this game alone in the dark. We had no idea what people would think of it!Thinking about the roguelike elements, how did you implement randomization? What was most difficult to balance here?Our team has a huge range of skill levels when it comes to gaming. We balanced “easy” to Julian, “medium” to me, and “hard” to Jimp.The other nice thing about dungeon crawlers is that you don’t really need the randomization to be very balanced. It’s actually more fun when you have a run where you get lucky, and sometimes you get really unlucky. It’s that variety that makes it fun!Balancing was mostly focused on enemy and boss HP against the level of your character’s starting weapon. Then there was experimentation with faith and hunger levels.We also have a lot of things under the hood of the game that adjust to the player if you’re struggling. For example, if you’re low on health, you’re much more likely to find a heart in the grass or to loot one from a chest.During our Twitch stream at GDC, you and the team talked about how taking advantage of the cult members is central to the game. How did you ensure that your players would feel like they were making difficult yet impactful choices when managing the cult?That was a decision we made very early on, and it pervades the entire DNA of the game. Really, it was part of almost every design decision we made.One thing that took us a while to figure out was how to make sacrificing a follower feel valuable. You originally just got gold for it, but it never felt valuable enough, so we knew we needed to make it more tempting for a player. That’s why we changed it to an instant level-up. Suddenly we found players were sacrificing their followers all the time!Another idea that we had from almost the beginning was being able to consume a follower to bring yourself back to life. That was originally a core mechanic of the game, but we decided to bring it in a bit later instead. Making leveled-up followers give more hearts is a great example – the cult members you care about more, and have invested in more, we make more tempting to kill. Basically, anything you care about, we try to make it tempting for you to do something horrible to it.What are the most important things you learned during the making of Cult of the Lamb that will impact how you approach your next project?Pick a theme and then create three design pillars; that will be how you fulfill the promise that the theme creates. For example, if it’s a game about cults, then you need a sacrifice ritual – even if you don’t yet know how it will be used mechanically.Once you have those pillars, absolutely every design decision must directly feed back into them. You might come up with a really cool idea, but if it doesn’t support that pillar, then you have to scrap it or your game will become unfocused.Start with a concept – it’s X meets Y – don’t just make another metroidvania or Stardew Valley clone. Even if you do decide to make another metroidvania, do something to elevate it so that you’re offering something new and exciting. It will make things much easier to get your foot in the door with publishers, socials, and press. Plus, while it might be more demanding, it’s incredibly rewarding to challenge yourself.Cult of the Lamb is available now on Nintendo Switch™, PC, PlayStation®4, PlayStation®5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. Follow @MassiveMonsters on Twitter for updates and visit our Indie Innovation hub for more stories featuring Unity creators making waves in the games industry.Answers attributed to Jay Armstrong.Nintendo Switch is a registered trademark of Nintendo.

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1100|blog.unity.com

The 5 steps to launching a hyper-casual game in 2022

At this year’s Mobidictum Business Conference, Lior Shekel, Director of Strategic Partnerships at ironSource, walked through 5 steps to launch a hit hyper-casual game today - including tips for marketability testing, soft launching, and global launching. Let’s dive in.Step 1: Run a marketability test on social networksThe first step to launching a hyper-casual game is running an initial marketability test on social media networks - this tells you its relative potential for success in the market. Facebook is typically the best place to start - it has a simple integration, it’s relatively fast and cheap to use, and offers a vast audience. Essentially, testing on Facebook gives you a general idea whether your game prototype matches your KPI goals.If test results on Facebook look promising, try marketability testing on other social networks like Google, Snapchat and TikTok. This will give you even broader confirmation that your game stands out among the competition.Step 2: Run a marketability test on SDK networksOnce initial KPIs are looking good, now it’s time to test on SDK networks. Why? SDK networks offer the biggest audience possible, and the biggest opportunity for your game to scale up during the global launch. Just because a game passes marketability on Facebook, doesn’t necessarily mean it will scale on an SDK network later on.To understand marketability on SDK networks, we look at eCPM, which is IPM multiplied by CPI. Like the chart shows, the campaigns that generate the highest eCPMs will be the ones to top the SDK networks’ data science ad serving models, winning the most impressions and scaling the fastest. Essentially, the higher the eCPM, the more the purchasing power your campaign has on the network.Step 3: Implement ad monetizationOnce your game’s KPIs look promising on both social media and SDK networks, you’re almost ready for launch. But first, you need to maximize your monetization opportunities through the game content itself. This includes adding more levels, A/B testing different placement and creative strategies, determining a basic game economy, and more.This way, before launch, you’re putting yourself in the best position to profit from your game, while ensuring your users have the most positive and exciting experience possible.Step 4: Run a soft launchNow it’s time to soft launch your game - releasing the product ahead of the scheduled launch is an opportunity to simulate real-world interactions. Since you’ve already tested your marketability, you can confidently soft launch on every ad network possible to increase your buying power.Some hyper-casual studios choose to initially soft launch on social networks, then later on SDKs - but we see that the most successful cases soft launch everywhere at once. Let’s dive into two different soft launch strategies.Going all inThe first strategy, the “all-in” launch, focuses on scaling up quickly to find the profitable and scalable sweet spot. It starts with a higher-than-average bid (we recommend around 20% higher), giving you a higher eCPM, as we mentioned earlier (remember CPI, or bid, is a factor of eCPM). By spending extra money, you’re increasing your eCPM - so you can scale quickly and top the charts, but your profit KPIs will drop as a result. To retain your revenue, we recommend capping this campaign at $500-1000 daily.Next, you lower your bid each day by no more than 10% - increasing the budget cap simultaneously. This process usually takes around 3 days, helping you reach your sweet spot when you can start granular bidding - carefully setting and adjusting different bids according to their source behavior. You should bid per source based on the quality that it’s generating for you, such as increasing bids in sources with a good ROAS.Staying conservativeConversely, a conservative launch is much more stable - but because it prioritizes profit, it scales much more slowly. With this strategy, you start with your target bid, which means your budget will likely be smaller, but will soon grow. At this stage, it’s crucial to prevent your game from reaching its budget cap - it harms the game’s positive trend and growth potential.To start granular bidding within 4-5 days, you should also be monitoring ROAS from day 1.Comparing four games that used one of these two strategies - every single one hit the top charts, with games using the “all-in” strategy staying there for a slightly longer time. Most importantly, despite the strategy, the games’ total revenue was virtually the same at the end of the day.Staying ahead of the curveNo matter which soft launch strategy you use, we recommend first launching in the US - it’s the biggest market offering the highest bids and eCPMs. From there, we recommend waiting 2-3 days before launching globally. To get maximum scale from your top sources, it’s best to optimize based on ROAS source bidding. Eventually, you can go on “auto-pilot” mode by turning on automated ROAS optimizer campaigns within each ad network - reducing workload for the whole team.As you global launch, keep these tips in mind:- Timing is everything - launch close to the weekend for longer retention and more playtime- Utilize your top-performing creatives and test new creatives - this improves IPM, which therefore boosts eCPM (eCPM = IPM x eCPI)- Call your users to action using different interactive and playable end cards to increase IPMStep 5: Automate and scale upCongrats! You’ve now global launched your game, new users are joining every day, and LTV is becoming much more accurate. Now is the best time to automate user acquisition, so you and your team can not only focus on acquiring the users, but also the game itself - and you can buy users much more efficiently.Not only does automation free your time, but it also uses highly accurate data - many ROAS optimizers today bid on an extremely granular level, for example per user and per ad request. This expands your reach because you can adjust your bids all the time, while your optimizer continues to optimize to scale and profit.By launching your hyper-casual game in a thoughtful way, you’re ensuring it’s on the best path for success - from the earliest marketability testing stages, all the way through post launch and automation.

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