Q&A with Unity's David Helgason

Imagine editor Tallulah Speed caught up with David Helgason, CEO of game development software company Unity Technologies, to talk Triple A, online communities, and big screen walls with dogs inside them.

Tallulah: So, you announced Bladeslinger this month, and Mind Candy are recruiting for a developer with knowledge of Unity. So is Unity moving into Triple A games?

David: Well, we’ve been doing that for a while – there are a number of productions going on, many of which are not public – people are secretive in this industry – that we’re moving into. It’s not really us moving, it’s the studios with big budgets, they very rationally control which technologies they use, because it’s a risk, if you pick a new technology that nobody’s used before and it fails, you look like an idiot, it’s you whose picked the technology so it’s you who looks bad. So it’s taken a long time to convince studios to use Unity but we’ve earned their trust so the teams using Unity are bigger and working on bigger things. We have some big customers and a big enterprise electronic agreement with Electronic Arts – we are using a number of teams and a big German animations company, they’re basically building most if not all of the new games on Unity. The title triple A refers to many things, but definitely more things are defined as triple A and are happening with happening with Triple A now. 

T: What modifications to the games engine are you currently working on?

D: We’re always working on a bunch of features. In the last year we’ve doubled our engineering staff to like, 65, so there’s a lot of people about! A lot of the work we do is optimising and fixing bugs, and just making it really robust – that’s a sort of continuous, infinite process of course and one that over time we’ll be able to do all of that a lot faster.
And then of course, we’re working on the Flash export programme, which means you can build inside Unity and run it alongside Flash. We’re working on really beautiful visuals, smoke sets and explosions and all kinds of beautiful fancy effects like that, really fast. For example, whenever you see clouds in computer programmes from a distance, it’s actually a lot of different small objects that are blending into each other and to have a lot of this and do it very fast it requires a lot of technology. Most of this is delivered for 3.5, which is due out around Christmas.

We’re also working on some other technology. Maybe for particular interest, we’ve acquired a small company in Montreal. It’s actually the first time we’ve acquired a company and it’s a small team of people who’ve worked their whole career in computer animation technology, so they formed some of the core team of Motion Builder used by a lot of animators, for a lot of 3D character animation, and also for things like Assassin Street, technology for really high end, realistic animation. They’re just incredible guys, so the Canada office is working not on something that will be in the next version, the 3.5, but the version after that, and we’re not really saying exactly how it’s going to be but it’s going to make it much easier to work with high end animation and working with high end teams, characters interacting with the environment, and we will make it much easier for small animation studios and small teams that have a hard time kind of stitching those together. We think that character animation is one of these things that can add a lot to games and but it’s used way less than it should be, because its complicated to get it all together.

T:  So, Unity as a sort of brand has a real community sense to it. Do you think this could risk being diminished if the larger studios start using the games engine itself?

D: They’re already there (laughs). No, actually, there’s many layers of fear around the community, where rational people have seen communities collapse and companies become nasty, so that’s why there’s that fear.
For a long time we were Mac only, and two-and-a-half years ago you could only build on a Mac. And I remember when we were Mac only we were going to announced to the community that we would make a PC version, because there’s measures of growth, there’s a lot of people with PCs and some people freaked out. It’s a bit cruel – I shouldn’t collar them all together, but you know, they freaked out because they thought hordes of idiotic PC users were going to come, but the PC users turned out to be pretty much the same. Because we were making interactive 3D games or a lot of other things as well, building these complex 3D things, by definition you need to be intelligent and creative, and the PC users turned out to be intelligent and creative just like the Mac users.

T: It sounds like apartheid.

I know! Maybe another valid point is that there was this fear that we would leave our roots behind and start ignoring the small developers and I can happily say that that hasn’t happened yet. The intention is that it’s not going to happen, we haven’t changed the pricing, there’s still a free version and there’s still a paid for version, we’re still doing community support and free support, and we now have a free support programme.

T: Who would you say your biggest competitors in the games engine sector are?

D: Sure, I’ll be careful because we have some competitors that are just trying to be the same but the proportions are fairly small and don’t have a lot of traction, so really I think more importantly than the direct competitors are the companies that are doing something similar that people end up deciding between. So for instance if you want to make a tween game you naturally use Flash – at least for mobile people use Unity – but for 2D experiences Flash is the best choice, our job is to make it so more people want to use 3D technologies, and make it so you can blend 2D and 3D so people don’t have to choose between the two choices.

T: your games engine is obviously used by games developers, but also architecture firms and now the army! Are there any other uses for the software emerging that you hadn’t anticipated?

D: Yeah, actually in the first business plan in 2004 we had a whole section of other uses and we saw a few, not so much architectural and engineering, but we definitely saw military uses, not about killing but teaching people to fix engines and such like, and there’s a lot of training mechanically and things like that.
We’ve seen Unity used in every imaginable way – somebody once created a semi-arts semi-science piece, which is a big screen wall and inside the wall is a dog you can interact with, so there’s that, Unity’s been put into machines, old fashioned arcade machines, lots of graphics and explosions and 3D effects. Unity has also been used for medical training applications, there’s a medical dictionary, like a research, like reference work called the visible body, and on the iPad where you can browse the body and see objects by name, for professionals and students, and there’s a whole bunch of Unity uses for training. The fundamental thing is that it is a really good tool to visualise relationships between objects and people and how to do things and give some deep sense of how it is to be in certain situations. That can be used by any industry of the world, and I see that happening. The gaming industry and Unity can make training and other chores a lot easier for people, but if you go out of the gaming industry you have a lot of people who don’t have a tradition for these kind of things, and as they discover them a lot of new cases can emerge. And we see a lot of that.

T: Are many universities teaching Unity?

D: Yeah, hundreds! All over the world game education has been one of the fastest curricular areas, and Unity is the tool of choice for a lot of them for many reasons, it’s easy to teach, also because it’s a professional thing, someone can learn it at school and go out and get a job, or for students to go out and create their own studios, and then you get students who study Unity and gaming at university and then go out not into the gaming industry but into other industries, as they can visualise objects or build training applications. It’s really broad and I’m very happy it gives people more opportunities with their lives.