Unity Hackweek 2018 Game Jam

(image from Mantas Puida)

In June I participated in our annual Unity Hackweek event, where people from around the company work across a diversity of teams (such as graphics, cloud services, machine learning) to learn and play with new ideas, get to know each other, and pull together some interesting projects. Unity Hackweek 2018: Creating X Together.

This year Unity invited people from other companies to attend alongside 500 Unity employees. I had the pleasure to work with members from Zynga and Kiloo (developers of "Subway Surfer") who we met through the Women in Gaming initiative.

Our team's focus was to create a game using Unity for Small Things (now called Instant Games) which is a suite of Unity components for building small instant-start web-based content, useful for creating games for platforms such as Facebook Messenger or creating playable ads.

Unity is also moving toward a new high-performance system called DOTS which Unity for Small Things is based on. DOTS is a "model for writing high-performance code by default" and is a new approach for developing Unity games.

One of us lost their luggage on the way to Denmark so this sparked some game themes. Our team built a small tile-matching puzzle similar to Tetris with luggage items such as socks, cameras, jeans, boots and Poké Balls. This gave us a nice opportunity to play with Unity for Small Things and DOTS.

To publish the game, Unity for Small Things exports the entire game (including assets and runtime) as one HTML file that can be easily uploaded. We hosted "Dude, where is my luggage?" over at https://briangershon.itch.io/dude-where-is-my-luggage

Our Game Jam Development Team

• Agata Foti (Kiloo)
• Aleksandra Glegola (Kiloo)
• Brian Gershon (Unity)
• Emily Skjøttgaard Smith (Kiloo)
• Helen Peng (Zynga)
• Raymond Yau (Unity)
• Subhi Kalaiarasan (Kiloo)