During the end of December, last year, Unity Technologies released the Unity 3.5 open beta which included the anticipated preview of the Flash deployment add-on. The new feature gave Unity developers the ability to deploy their 3D projects onto the web through the widely adopted Adobe Flash Player. Flash Player 11, released a few months earlier, included the highly touted Stage3D technology which meant fast, hardware accelerated 3D graphics was now possible via Flash for desktops.
For Unity Technologies, this meant a timely opportunity to use the Unity open beta release for a fast-paced competition to showcase the game engine's new Flash deployment feature. The Unity Flash in a Flash Creation Contest was held between December 22, 2011 and January 5, 2012 with a Grand Prize of $20,000 (USD) for the winning entry, as well as additional prices for the nine runner ups. More than 500 teams completed the mad dash over the Christmas holidays to submit a game, and most incredibly for our little island nation, two of the top four winning entries came from Brisbane.
The highly addictive Ski Safari from Brendan Watts and Shawn Eustace made runner-up placement, and Tail Drift, the beautifully looking, stomach churning, and unique aero-racer by one-man-team, Cameron Owen took the coveted number one spot. These titles are available for play right now in your browser on the Unity competition winners showcase page, so check them out right away if you haven't done so already! (There is an updated version of Tail Drift in Cameron's dropbox, so check that out here!)
We wanted to find out a bit more about Tail Drift so we were fortunate to grab Cameron for a few quick questions about his winning entry...
Congratulations on winning the Unity Flash in a Flash Creation Contest with Tail Drift!
Cameron Owen: Thanks, it came as quite a surprise. I knew I was up against a lot of great entries by other solo developers and indie teams. I was secretly hoping for a top 10 finish but was genuinely speechless for a while once I found out. I was also happy to see Ski Safari by Brendan Watts and Shawn Eustace also in the top 10. Their game is wickedly addictive too.
How long did it take to develop Tail Drift?
Cameron Owen: About 10 days start to finish. I heard about the contest on Christmas Eve and started that day, except for spending Xmas day with my fabulous family every waking hour from then till the 5th of January was spent working on the game.
I slept about 4 hours a night for the last week and not at all during the last 36 hours. Not the healthiest method of game development but overall is was quite a rush. I'm not sure what that says about me but, well, moving on.
What are you planning to do with the $20,000 cash prize?
Cameron: Most of it will go back into developing the game further and upgrading my dinosaur of a computer. I'm light of work right now so it couldn't have come at a better time.
You're credited as doing all the programming, artwork, and even the game design for Tail Drift. Which area do you find most fun developing in, and what was the most challenging aspect of developing Tail Drift?
Cameron: The most enjoyable part of making any game is always the design. I don't think anything can compare to the journey a game designer travels as she explores, collects and formulates new concepts. The moment when part of your game is just a squishy ball of potential awesome, after you've wrestled the idea into something concrete but right before you cut the code for it (and it all breaks) it's like candy-floss for the soul.
By far the most challenging aspect was not getting carried away with any one thing. The deadline was so tight every hour counted. At one point I started modelling clouds and they looked superbly plush and fluffy in game but creating enough variations to break up the repetition was too time consuming so I cut them.
At times specific gameplay features were buggy or too performance heavy in the final flash build so they'd be stripped out after two or three iterations if I hadn't managed to resolve them. Some assets were fully modelled and textured but I simply didn't have time to place them or to tweak the AI to compensate which would mean retesting so they were ommited. Cutting stuff always sucks, it's like losing a part of yourself, but the result of not cutting is that you're never going to finish so it's the lesser of two evils.
The initial visual concept I had in mind was also a lot different to the final submission. I first imagined a stark minimalist abstract environment and you would fly something that looked more like a paper airplane but that turned out to be too abstract. It just didn't look or feel right in motion. After a feverish youtube session reliving memories of Outrun and Wipeout I decided to make something that simply looked damn fun to explore and race through which seemed to be my missing ingredient.
What are your thoughts on Unity as a game development tool as well as its potential for Flash development now that you've produced a Flash product out of it?
Cameron: I really like the underpinning philosophy that Unity Technology appears to adopt with their tools. It's approachable and smartly structured yet powerful and flexible which are difficult qualities to balance. I come from a background of making games and interactive installations with Flash and before that Macromedia Director and I love the way Unity treats code like assets. Director has a similar way of working and I missed it dearly when switching to Flash as Director's plugin popularity declined.
Also, I haven't been a fan of the direction Adobe has taken with flash over the past few years. I preferred the earlier versions where you could open the program, hash out a few lines of code and have a working demo up in a matter of minutes. Flash isn't like that any more, the programming side is a lot more rigid, not as free-form or hack-friendly as I like my interactive environments to be. That may be the teacher in me talking though. Flash development was joy to teach a few years back, now it's just painful.
So yeah, it's great to see Unity has a Flash publishing path along with everything else. It almost feels like Macromedia Director has been reincarnated.
Do you have any plans on taking this title any further and finishing it off, or publishing for web or mobile platforms? If so, what areas would you expand on to make it a more complete game?
Cameron: Further development is defiantly on the table. As I mentioned earlier a lot of things were cut during the initial development sprint but for every asset or feature I started there were at least 10 ideas that didn't even make my short-list. My biggest regret of the demo level is that apart form the lighthouse and hot air balloons the world I presented is a bit lifeless and the track is somewhat divorced from the environment.
Adding actual characters, extravagant vehicles and environments that are much more dynamic and inhabited are the main things I want to explore moving forward. Such as having parts of the track broken up and strapped back together or loosely anchored onto the environment so they move about as you race across them and generally dialing up the crazy a few more notches.
I'm leaning more towards a mobile platform release as Tail Drift is undeniably an arcade racer which I think fits that platform well. My game is currently a solo project so I'm also very wary of the overall development scope. The last thing I want is to burn out half way through therefore focusing on a single platform seems to be the most sensible path.
What are your thoughts on indie games development now that you've seen many aspects of the local games industry, from a teacher, indie developer, as well as a developer working on console games?
Cameron: I'm an optimist so I think indie game development has a very bright future. At the ground level, tools like Unity and UDK make game development more approachable than it ever has been. The past few years has finally seen a massive ground swell in development communities all over which seems to be doing the same thing for indie game developers as it did for web developers and designers at the turn of the millennium - fostering a higher level of independent work. I think seeing solo, duo or small teams of developers self producing well polished games is inspiring, at least it has been for me as both a teacher and developer.
There's also been a shift towards more mobile and social orientated gaming experiences in recent years. Perhaps that's a natural evolution of technology in general, the tools developers have access too or something else but it means you don't need to be building massive budget blockbusters every x years and can instead be more creative, take more risks and just have more fun with it. Defiantly an exciting time to be an indie developer.