Unity in Ireland

At this year’s Unite Europe 2015, our own Chris Gregan (Fungus Games) was chosen as one of the speakers. As an Imirt Steering Committee member, he also met with the Unity team to plan their first official visit to Ireland. One month of planning culminated in two days’ worth of talks and meetings.

The main event was hosted in the Odessa club in Dublin on Tuesday 28th July. It ended up being the largest gathering of developers this year, with a lot of new faces joining in to meet Unity and fellow developers.

Imirt’s Brenda Romero was on hand to introduce the first speaker of the evening, Unity Evangelist, Josh Naylor. He began by taking everyone through a live demo of Unity 5. He then showed some of the features that the Unity 2D team, based in Singapore, are currently working on. All of these additions can be found on their BitBucket repository.

After that, Josh had time to show some games that have switched from Unity 4 to Unity 5. Rust and Gang Beasts both saw some impressive improvements by making the change.

Josh ended with a runthrough of Unity’s services: Cloud build, Unity Analytics and Unity Ads. On the Cloud Build side, he demoed a new feature that is currently in beta called Cloud Data. It allows you to modify MonoBehavior values in your released games for all your users, which is an incredibly powerful feature.

After that, there was a Q&A session, starting with the all important question - “Why can’t we have nested prefabs?” :)

The evening ended with six talks from developers based in Ireland. These were from David McDermott, Danny Moffatt, Kevin Murphy, Paul O'Donnell, Elaine Reynolds and Noel O'Connor.

The following day, there was the open house in SixMinute, giving everyone a chance to meet with the Unity team face to face. During the day, the team had over 20 meetings with developers from all over Ireland.

Overall, the visit was a great success, and we were happy to hear the Unity team plan to come back to visit again soon.