33 Ways to Make Money from Games

How Video Games Can Sweep in the Cash

David Perry

There are lots of ways to make money from the gaming industry. David Perry, co-founder and chief creative officer of Acclaim Games should know: In his 27-year (and counting) career, he has sold over a billion dollars worth of games at retail, the result of his work on titles such as Earthworm Jim, Disney's Aladdin, and The Matrix. In this exclusive BusinessWeek.com slide show, Perry outlines just a few of the promising business models that can be adopted by would-be gaming entrepreneurs.

MICROSOFT (XBOX)

Selling the Game

Selling physical, boxed product via bricks and mortar stores such as Gamestop (GME) andVirgin Megastore has been the historical backbone of the games industry. Online retail (Amazon [AMZN], EBGames.com, etc.) is a fast-growing area as well. But the long-term future of the games industry is all about digital distribution, as shown by Microsoft (MSFT), Nintendo (NTDOY), and Sony (SNE), all in on the action with their online game stores. This model includes PC direct-to-consumer services such as SteamPowered.com from Valve Software and Direct2Drive from IGN. Digital distribution also means "unlocking" access to a game already on a service. The new App Store from Apple (AAPL) is a good example of how to do this and make money (BusinessWeek.com, 8/11/08). 

In-Game Advertising

A game world can include paid-for billboards or clearly branded items or subtle product placement (clothing, sunglasses, or vehicles, as in Gaia Online. Paid advertising can also be built into a game as a story element—think of the scientist friend who just happened to work forNeutrogena, featured in the infamous Lonelygirl15 series shown on YouTube. In-game advertising specialists such as Double Fusion, IGA Worldwide, and Massive are leading this field as they can supply the advertising inventory images needed to be streamed into the game world.


Around-Game Advertising

Essentially, this means making money from the banner and skyscraper ads around the gameplay window. This is already common on Flash game aggregator sites such asKongregate.com, and many use services such as Google (GOOG) or Commission Junction. The revenue comes from CPM (cost per thousand views), CPC (cost per click), CPA (cost per acquisition of a player—who plays the game), or CPP (cost per "paying" player—who buys something). Clicks are generally only worth a few cents, but paying players can earn a company many dollars.

Finder's Fee from First Dollar

You need people to come and play your game, but if you can't afford CPM (cost per thousand views) advertising, which is essentially a bet on the effectiveness of someone else's Web site, don't despair! Even with no money to pay up-front, you can offer video-game Web sites either a percentage of net revenue or a "Finder's Fee from First Dollar." As money comes in from a player who has been directed to you from another site, that finder takes all the money until you hit the agreed fee (say $1.50 per player). In reality, they take all the risk and will be more aggressive in advertising your property than any campaign you could have paid for at CPM rates. If you balance the numbers, you can get a lot of Web sites working for you and sending you traffic this way. To make money from this, send your players to noncompetitive games in a similar kind of arrangement.

Advert-Games/"Advergaming"/Re-Dress

Already common on movie Web sites, games in which the whole experience is an advertisement can also be big. Think America's Army, made to find recruits for the U.S. Army, or the Burger King games on Xbox 360. Cool Spot back in the early 1990s was an early example made for 7UP. Players accepted that this game was a giant ad for 7UP—the main character was the big red dot from its logo! The advertiser helps fund the game while your reputation as a developer, publisher, or designer determines how much cash you can ask for. Another common way to make extra money from a game is to re-dress it for an advertiser and build a custom version. That's why you see so many clones of popular games like Bejeweled. (For an example, seeBewitched, made for Sony Pictures by Blitz Agency.)

Try Before You Buy

Trialware/Shareware/Demoware/Timedware lets you play crippled, shortened, or restricted-time versions of a game for free, while trying to up-sell the full version. This is a real balancing act as too much in the demo can kill any hope of future sales. Xbox Live has been experimenting with this concept and seems to have hit the sweet spot by giving one playable level and then closing with a big reveal (for instance: "There's a giant boss monster around the corner!"). Then they add: "Buy the full version to continue!" It's basically the old cliffhanger trick, and just as with TV drama, it works.

Episodic Entertainment/Expansion Packs

Again borrowing from TV, this model means that players buy a game's episodes as they become available, or pay to unlock everything current and new for a period of time, or pay for certain parts of the game. Sometimes the delays between episodes are quite major, in which case additions are often called "expansion packs." These introduce more content, characters, or places and are a great way to make money without having to remake the entire game itself.

Skill-Based Progressive Jackpots

This is where players buy a ticket to enter a virtual tournament. This generates a virtual jackpot, and the player who reaches a certain status wins. As the developer, you keep a percentage of the jackpot. The game must be skill-based to protect you from the current international gambling laws. King.com and Prizee.com are good examples of skill-based prize sites.


Velvet Rope or Members Club

Users pay for VIP access and get special privileges and access to special areas on your site or in your games. They sometimes get access to new products before anyone else. (The more interesting perks you give, the more likely people are to want to buy in.) Sometimes, when buried in the gameplay, a game character can charge a player a fee, like paying the ferry man to take you to a very special island. (The player pays the ferry man real money to gain access to this "exclusive" area.)

Subscription

Demonstrated successfully by the likes of World of Warcraft or Age of Conan, these games are paid for monthly, usually by credit card or automatic debit payment. Sometimes they're coupled with a retail purchase to get access to the install files and user manual, maps, etc. Commonly, players set up the credit-card payments and don't stop them, as they want to keep the game "available" in case they come back and play more someday. (It's pretty great to get a subscription from people who don't even play.)

Micro-Transactions

These are small, impulse-driven purchases bought for reasons of vanity, saving time, better communications, or even moving up a level more quickly. (Levels are a player's ranking within a virtual society.) They're generally paid for using virtual points, either earned in the game (by playing), or bought for real money (which is a massive time-saver). A new trend is offering virtual items in exchange for access to a player's real-world friends. So for example: "You can have this magic sword, if you invite a friend to play." Getting that balance right can mean stunning revenue growth, which makes it even more important for you come up with offers the gamers really want. This technique works well on social networks like Facebook as friends are just a click away. If you can get more than a 1 to 1 ratio, the game goes viral, which results in exponential growth. That's the goal here.

Sponsored Games/Donationware

Also known as "Serious Games" (usually games played to learn things, or improve the world), these are the games that in some way help society. They could be paid for by a philanthropist, state or government grants, a charity, or by a nonprofit. Onebiggame is an example. To be clear, there's no money to be made from the game itself as it's commonly given away. So if you do make a sponsored game, be sure to include your profit in the development or distribution bid.

Pay Per Play/Pay As You Go/Pay for Time

Just as in the old arcade machine or pinball days, players pay for a go. They only pay for what they need, for a pre-set number of lives, or as long as they can last. Also used in Internet cafes and game parlors where they sell computer time, this model can be used for game time online as well.

Player-to-Player Trading/Auctions

This allows players to trade land, property, characters, and items—directly and also through auctions. You keep a cut of all the money exchanged. You also keep the transactions safe for the player (they don't have to risk the black market for characters). Some games let players cash earned money out of the game, and managing the transactions can become a full-time job. But it's also a major fraud generator (players use fake credit cards, buy things, trade things, sell for cash, cash out), so you have been warned. Companies such as Live Gamer are trying to make this safer for players.

Foreign Distribution Deals

When you need funding, pre-sell your foreign distribution rights. Then use that money to fund the project in the countries you care about the most. So imagine taking advances from Russia, Asia and Europe to fund a title you plan to release in the U.S. (where you own the rights). This can save a lot of money and leaves you owning the IP rights to whatever you build, which is incredibly valuable if the game is a hit.

Sell Player Access/Co-Registration Offers

This is where you monetize your users by inserting special offers or personal profile questions into the registration loop. So when a player registers, he or she is asked to fill out a profile in return for virtual points. PrimeQ.com is an example of an agency doing this, where you get paid for each form you can get filled out for them. They then sell this live data to external marketing companies looking for hot leads. (The value of a lead is equal to how exclusive, revealing, and fresh the data are.) The agency generally provides the questions and the Web site capture forms.

Freeware

This actually isn't a model to make money per se, but if you create something that's very compelling and it gets a lot of users, you can expect offers to acquire your software, company, or technology. So make it for free, get noticed, get bought or hired, and in a very roundabout way, you've monetized freeware.

Loss Leader

This means you sell a game far too cheaply in order to focus on your real goal and the real money. You use the passionate following to your free game to help sell something else, like a toy, TV, or movie deal, and that's where you rake in the cash. For example, you make a good game and sell it at what seems like an amazing deal for the player. What you are really doing is building awareness for a brand or for characters, for which you have other financial goals.KiddieCastle.com is doing something like this to get parents and kids to notice its vending machines at airports and theme parks.

Peripheral Enticement

The Nintendo Wii Fit game with the Wii Balance Board or gym equipment (such as virtual bikes or rowing machines) provide good examples of this model, which essentially means that a game cannot function without a piece of equipment. It's really a way to tease players with software they want to experience and get them to spend money on an expensive piece of hardware. Rock Band from Electronic Arts (ERTS) is another good example of this model in action.

Player-to-Player Wagering

Players place wagers before going head to head. The winner keeps the pot and the developer keeps a percentage of every pot. As with the jackpot business model discussed earlier, these games must be skill-based. Gambling virtual items is another model whereby players buy, earn, or trade virtual items, then bet them with the winner keeping all. (You made your money selling the items in the first place.)

User-Generated Content

This is where your users make endless new content (like virtual buildings, clothing, music, etc.), and then they sell or exchange it with each other. The design of your game needs to include user stores, and you take a commission.

Pay for Storage Space

Offer space on a server for players to save progress, stats, game data, etc. This can be used for karaoke games, for example, where players pay to store an instant library of their favorite songs with their customized reverb/volume/lyrics settings. Or say you adopted the user-generated content model of the previous slide. You might then also sell extra storage space for players to store all the virtual items they keep winning and buying.

Host Private Game Server

This is more for the hard-core players of games such as Counterstrike who need really fast network-response times to make a game fun. You rent dedicated servers with the gameplay server software pre-installed, meaning players have access to a "ready to go" dedicated server. They share this access with their group of close friends (who commonly help cover the bill), and they can all avoid the dreaded lag issue, when the Internet slows down gameplay. These players pay to be assured a high-quality Internet network experience when playing their favorite game.

Rental

The old rental paradigm meant trying to design a game so it couldn't be played through within one rental period. These days, services such as GameFly mean that doesn't matter so much anymore. But rental stores can drive a lot of early sales of boxed products since they stock new titles when they're first launched. Making a "Special Edition" for a specific retail partner gives that outlet a compelling reason to get behind your game. All you have to do is find a way to add some very compelling content that will make gamers make the effort to play the "rental" version of the game.

Licensing

This includes ideas such as signing a deal with a chain of cyber cafés to unlock your game for their users. Or using your game as a part of a TV show. Or letting a corporation use your "hip" or "cult" game brand in their advertising. A good example is the McDonalds/Line Rider advert.

Sell Branded Physical Items

Use a service like Cafepress to sell T-shirts and branded objects to people who love your game. Alternatively, set up a deal with a company such as Figure Prints, which lets players create and buy mini sculptures of their avatars.

Pre-Sell a Game to Its Players

This model lets fans fund the development of a title. For example, they pay $10 in advance for a $50 game. They get to see the game developed, and they provide feedback before it launches. When the game is launched, they get it for free—they don't have to pay the remaining $40 for the game. Clearly you have to have a great reputation or a very hot idea to generate enough interest to pull this off, but it can work. Essentially, you found a way to get fans to fund your next game.

Before-Game Advertising

This means players watch an ad before being allowed to play a game for free. It does require them to be patient, but it also works as they are a captive audience. You can get plenty of advertising inventory from companies including Game Jacket, Mochi Media, VideoEgg, and Ultramercial, and it's a very easy way to make revenues with your game. Be aware, however, that developers now get a pretty small amount of revenues from advertising this way (unless they have major traffic). But developers can also use these adverts to drive micro-transaction sales, selling a special 30-day item that turns off the advertising. That item can make you a lot more money per player than the advertising would have. You can also offer "optional" advertising, rewarding players that turn on the adverts with virtual coins or experience boosts. A new trick is to offer "invisible" wrappers, so if a game is played on your Web site, there's no advertising, but if someone grabs the game and puts it on their site (30,000 sites do this), then advertising before the game turns on automatically. So they got your game, but you get their advertising.

Virtual Item Sponsorship

Advertisers pay reduced fees to buy large quantities of virtual items that they then offer for free to gamers. So you make your money from the advertisers, and the gamers are happy to receive an item from a sponsor. You sell Coca-Cola (KO) 500,000 magic potions that boost a character's energy at a low cost, and you make the same item very expensive for the gamer to buy. Then the game shows a pop-up where Coca-Cola offers them the item for free. That's the most positive exchange with an advertiser ever, as Coca-Cola is giving players something they want and know is valuable. So everyone is happy.

Add Download Insurance

That's the $3.95 a gamer sees on an invoice with a little note that says: "To keep your download available online, just in case you need it." The publisher is basically saying: "Buy and download this game now. Pay an extra fee, and if your hard drive dies, you can always come back and download the game again." So in a funky way, it's like selling insurance.

Pay Players to Meet a Challenge

I first saw this in a Mafia-style game where players were paid $1,000 in real money from the publisher if they could "Whack a Don" in the game. That basically turned the player into a virtual hit man. As the game designer or developer, you obviously make the task really difficult and blend it with other revenue methods to fund any $1,000 payments you might have to make. So in reality the method here is to seem to be paying the user to play, but the game is making enough money to cover those payments. The bigger the game gets, the bigger the reward gets. So balanced just right, this could be very successful as a monetization method.

Sell Something Consumable

Another trend in free-to-play games is to sell consumable items such as virtual bullets to fire guns, virtual birthday cards for other players, or even the virtual gas you need to drive a car. However, this model really grays the "free-to-play" line and should be a last resort for generating revenue.

Feed Me or I Die!

Players spend a lot of time making characters they care dearly about. (You will never understand this unless you've invested endless hours in something that can be erased in seconds.) So there are two techniques to keep virtual characters "alive": pay to feed them (by buying virtual food) or, less creatively, pay to get access to them. Designers are now adding more and more things a player needs to do to keep a character alive. For instance, keep them healthy through visits to the virtual doctor. In fact, designers can give your "pet" or "character" any disease they like, and you have to deal with it. Not kind, but its another monetization model.

Games We Love - How Free Games Make Money

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"When a game's not working, some people quit. Others change the rules."

Three years ago, Howard Marks, best known for resurrecting the financially flailing game maker Activision (nasdaq: ATVI - news - people) in the early 1990s, snapped up the remaining assets of bankrupt Acclaim Entertainment for $100,000. Now Acclaim is releasing games--charging players nothing to play--and aiming to be profitable within the next 12 months.

Instead of monthly fees, Marks is betting that he can create a profitable business entirely supported by posting in-game advertisements and selling virtual tchotchkes. "We believe that consumers would prefer to play high-quality games for free rather than pay $60 for a game in a retail store," says Marks.

It's a gutsy--but not entirely irrational--strategy. The U.S. gaming market sells about $18.8 billion a year--about half of which is sales of software for PCs and other devices, according to analyst NPD Group. Subscription gaming revenues in the U.S. last year amounted to about $600 million, says David Cole, president of DFC Intelligence, a market research firm in San Diego. Item sales barely register, he adds.

That's not true in Asia, however. Over the past seven or so years, gaming companies in Korea, and more recently, China, have built gaming empires by letting people play for free and selling them anything from virtual weapons to fashionable boots. San Francisco-based Pearl Research estimates that as much as 75% of the $1.7 billion Chinese gaming market is built on virtual item sales. Now Marks, and a small but growing number of U.S. gaming companies, are venturing down the same path.

Marks was sold on free-to-play games soon after buying Acclaim. Two weeks after the deal, Marks headed to Korea to tour 30 developers. Their stories were compelling: Company after company recited how it increased revenues several-fold by dropping subscription fees and making games free.

With no entry fee, players turned out to be willing to spend money to accessorize and augment their characters. In 2005 alone, Seoul-based game maker Nexon collected $230 million from its library of free-to-play, item-supported games. At least in Korea, the subscription model of games seemed a dead end.

"I instantly had an epiphany," Marks recalls. He would follow Korea's lead--both by rebuilding top-selling Korean games for the U.S. market and by relying on advertising and in-game sales to players, rather than subscription fees. "I decided this [is the] way people will play games in the near future," says Marks.

Going free is one way smaller game publishers can carve out a space for themselves in an industry increasingly dominated by enormous game distributors. World of Warcraft, for instance, which commands the attention of 10 million players worldwide, has become a profit geyser for Irvine, Calif.-based Blizzard Entertainment, a division of Vivendi Games.

But getting into such multi-player, role-playing games is a big commitment, involving fees of $15 a month and often soaking up 20 hours a week as players inch their way up competitive rankings.

By contrast, anyone with a computer and Internet connection can drop in to play a free-to-play game. Instead of spending hours advancing their characters, players can shore up their inexperience by buying better swords, more potent potions or protective garments.

By the time Acclaim launched "Bots!!," its first repackaged game in the U.S. market in 2006, the free-to-play trend was beginning to percolate throughout North America. Nexon had quietly rolled out its free-to-play game, MapleStory, in late 2005. When it turned up the marketing hype in February 2007, millions of users bought up 600,000 items, totaling sales of $1.6 million.

Acclaim's gratis games offer players a variety of ways to play for free. In "Bots!!," a robot arena game, players buy "Acclaim Coins" they can spend on virtual armor, guns or attack moves. In the adults-only "2Moons," gamers can opt in to watching video ads in exchange for boosting their characters' experience level. The Kung Fu-themed "9Dragons" rewards players who click through to video advertisements with in-game currency and special items.

Other small game companies began catching free-to-play fever, too.

The secret to winning big revenue is to dangle the right carrot in front of players, says Daniel James, chief executive of San Francisco-based Three Rings.

Soon after launching its casual multiplayer game "Puzzle Pirates," James calculated the cost of adding additional players to the game was negligible. In 2005, James broke down the toll booth--instead, players could use real cash to buy virtual doubloons--which, in turn, they could use to bedeck their pirates in loot or purchase other status symbols. Over a year, "Puzzle Pirates" went from collecting $50,000 a month in subscriptions to raking in twice that by selling virtual doubloons.

Only 15% to 20% of "Puzzle Pirates" players ever buy doubloons--but those who do buy a lot. Virtual currency purchases accounted for roughly 75% of Puzzle Pirates $4 million revenue in 2007. It's a lot like letting crowds into a movie theater for free, then collecting serious coinage from those who crave popcorn and Jolly Ranchers.

Inspired by such success, big gaming companies are now entering the free fray, too.

"We knew which direction the world would go," says Sony (nyse: SNE -news - people ) Online Entertainment President John Smedley. "We're going to be right on that wave." Sony's next game, "Free Realms," slated to launch later this year, will rely primarily on in-game advertising and item sales. Players who don't want to sit through a 30-second ad at login but do want "velvet rope" benefits can choose to subscribe.

"My gut tells me this will work," says Smedley. "It's about the raw numbers. We're [now] looking at tens of millions of people, not hundreds of thousands." And if "Free Realms" turns a profit, all of Sony's future, massively multiplayer gaming titles could go free, too.

Even Electronic Arts (nasdaq: ERTS - news - people ) is testing out free-to-play with an upcoming title, "Battlefield Heroes"--a casual offshoot of its popular PC-and-console shooter game. Slated to launch in September, "Battlefield Heroes" will sell items to pump up players' rankings as well as collect ad revenue from banners hosted on the official site, which players must visit to launch the game. EA Chief Executive John Riccitiello has gone so far as to declare that the $60 retail game will be obsolete within the next 10 years.

For Acclaim, the free-to-play business model has already exceeded Howard Marks' expectations. He had hoped for 2 million registered users by the end of 2007, and instead, has 5 million. He also had expected his 500,000 dedicated users to spend $25 apiece on item sales; they've been buying more. Since Acclaim launched "2Moons" last August, dedicated players have spent an average of $57 on virtual items.

"Many publishers will not be able to jump in because they want to protect their existing business model," says Marks. "They may not survive a transition to the free-to-play model. In our case, we started there."

Detail steps to import SketchUp models into Unity3d

After the acquisition of SketchUp since Google, SketchUp is a more powerful, and updated much faster speed, here is how to import SketchUp file into Unity3D!
1. When start new SketchUp project, select the engineering units for the Meter (m), if not meters, in the Tools -> Model Info -> Unit within the Format changes to Decimal: Meters can be.

Because it will affect the original SketchUp, so please note that the accuracy is not enough if Precision also need to change to sufficient accuracy, also set the Enable length snapping consistency and accuracy to enable them to correctly perform automatic capture.

2. Select File -> Export -> 3D Model, file format is FBX (only Pro version of SketchUp Caixing). Click Options to modify several options.

Export Options in

Select the Triangulate all faces into all the surface triangles

Select Export two-sided faces are exported to both sides (some flat sides of different materials, it is very important)

Select Export texture maps derived surface texture

Select the Swap YZ coordinates (Y up)

Unit selection Model Unit (the first step if you are right, this election is the same effect Meters)

OK then, you can click Export.

3, In Unity3D, select Asserts -> Import New Asset. Find the exported FBX file. After the file has been imported, select file in Project window. In Inspector window , set FPXImporter/Meshes/Scale Factor to 1. Finally, the model was dragged into the scene and you're done! Enjoy it.

Introduction to Game Development Using Unity 3D

This article by Ryan Henson Creighton, author of Unity 3D Game Development by Example, introduces you to Unity 3D—an amazing game engine that enables you to create games and deploy them to a number of different devices, including (at the time of writing) the Web, PCs, iOS platforms, and WiiWare, with modules for Android and Xbox Live Arcade deployment in the works. You'll play a number of browser-based Unity 3D games to get a sense of what the engine can handle, from a massively-multiplayer online game all the way down to a simple kart racer. You'll download and install your own copy of Unity 3D, and mess around with the beautiful Island Demo that ships with the product.

Unity 3D Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide

A seat-of-your-pants manual for building fun, groovy little games quickly Build fun games using the free Unity 3D game engine even if you've never coded before Learn how to "skin" projects to make totally different games from the same file – more games, less effort! Deploy your games to the Internet so that your friends and family can play them Packed with ideas, inspiration, and advice for your own game design and development Stay engaged with fresh, fun writing that keeps you awake as you learn

Read more about this book

(For more resources on this subject, see here.)

Technology is a tool. It helps us accomplish amazing things, hopefully more quickly and more easily and more amazingly than if we hadn't used the tool. Before we had newfangled steam-powered hammering machines, we had hammers. And before we had hammers, we had the painful process of smacking a nail into a board with our bare hands. Technology is all about making our lives better and easier. And less painful.

Introducing Unity 3D

Unity 3D is a new piece of technology that strives to make life better and easier for game developers. Unity is a game engine or a game authoring tool that enables creative folks like you to build video games.

By using Unity, you can build video games more quickly and easily than ever before. In the past, building games required an enormous stack of punch cards, a computer that filled a whole room, and a burnt sacrificial offering to an ancient god named Fortran. Today, instead of spanking nails into boards with your palm, you have Unity. Consider it your hammer—a new piece of technology for your creative tool belt.

Unity takes over the world

We'll be distilling our game development dreams down to small, bite-sized nuggets instead of launching into any sweepingly epic open-world games. The idea here is to focus on something you can actually finish instead of getting bogged down in an impossibly ambitious opus. When you're finished, you can publish these games on the Web, Mac, or PC.

The team behind Unity 3D is constantly working on packages and export opinions for other platforms. At the time of this writing, Unity could additionally create games that can be played on the iPhone, iPod, iPad, Android devices, Xbox Live Arcade, PS3, and Nintendo's WiiWare service. Each of these tools is an add-on functionality to the core Unity package, and comes at an additional cost. As we're focusing on what we can do without breaking the bank, we'll stick to the core Unity 3D program for the remainder of this article. The key is to start with something you can finish, and then for each new project that you build, to add small pieces of functionality that challenge you and expand your knowledge. Any successful plan for world domination begins by drawing a territorial border in your backyard.

Browser-based 3D? Welcome to the future

Unity's primary and most astonishing selling point is that it can deliver a full 3D game experience right inside your web browser. It does this with the Unity Web Player—a free plugin that embeds and runs Unity content on the Web.

Time for action – install the Unity Web Player

Before you dive into the world of Unity games, download the Unity Web Player. Much the same way the Flash player runs Flash-created content, the Unity Web Player is a plugin that runs Unity-created content in your web browser.

1. Go to http://unity3D.com.
2. Click on the install now! button to install the Unity Web Player.
   

   

3. Click on Download Now!
4. Follow all of the on-screen prompts until the Web Player has finished installing.
   

   

Welcome to Unity 3D!

Now that you've installed the Web Player, you can view the content created with the Unity 3D authoring tool in your browser.

What can I build with Unity?

In order to fully appreciate how fancy this new hammer is, let's take a look at some projects that other people have created with Unity. While these games may be completely out of our reach at the moment, let's find out how game developers have pushed this amazing tool to its very limits.

FusionFall

The first stop on our whirlwind Unity tour is FusionFall—a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG). You can find it at fusionfall.com. You may need to register to play, but it's definitely worth the extra effort!

FusionFall was commissioned by the Cartoon Network television franchise, and takes place in a re-imagined, anime-style world where popular Cartoon Network characters are all grown up. Darker, more sophisticated versions of the Powerpuff Girls, Dexter, Foster and his imaginary friends, and the kids from Codename: Kids Next Door run around battling a slimy green alien menace.

Completely hammered

FusionFall is a very big and very expensive high-profile game that helped draw a lot of attention to the then-unknown Unity game engine when the game was released. As a tech demo, it's one of the very best showcases of what your new technological hammer can really do! FusionFall has real-time multiplayer networking, chat, quests, combat, inventory, NPCs (non-player characters), basic AI (artificial intelligence), name generation, avatar creation, and costumes. And that's just a highlight of the game's feature set. This game packs a lot of depth.

Should we try to build FusionFall?

At this point, you might be thinking to yourself, "Heck YES! FusionFall is exactly the kind of game I want to create with Unity, and this article is going to show me how!"

Unfortunately, a step-by-step guide to creating a game the size and scope of FusionFall would likely require its own flatbed truck to transport, and you'd need a few friends to help you turn each enormous page. It would take you the rest of your life to read, and on your deathbed, you'd finally realize the grave error that you had made in ordering it online in the first place, despite having qualified for free shipping.

Here's why: check out the game credits link on the FusionFall website:http://www.fusionfall.com/game/credits.php.

This page lists all of the people involved in bringing the game to life. Cartoon Network enlisted the help of an experienced Korean MMO developer called Grigon Entertainment. There are over 80 names on that credits list! Clearly, only two courses of action are available to you:

• Build a cloning machine and make 79 copies of yourself. Send each of those copies to school to study various disciplines, including marketing, server programming, and 3D animation. Then spend a year building the game with your clones. Keep track of who's who by using a sophisticated armband system.
• Give up now because you'll never make the game of your dreams.

Another option

Before you do something rash and abandon game development for farming, let's take another look at this. FusionFall is very impressive, and it might look a lot like the game that you've always dreamed of making. This article is not about crushing your dreams. It's about dialing down your expectations, putting those dreams in an airtight jar, and taking baby steps. Confucius said: "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." I don't know much about the man's hobbies, but if he was into video games, he might have said something similar about them—creating a game with a thousand awesome features begins by creating a single, less feature-rich game.

So, let's put the FusionFall dream in an airtight jar and come back to it when we're ready. We'll take a look at some smaller Unity 3D game examples and talk about what it took to build them.

Off-Road Velociraptor Safari

No tour of Unity 3D games would be complete without a trip to Blurst.com—the game portal owned and operated by indie game developer Flashbang Studios. In addition to hosting games by other indie game developers, Flashbang has packed Blurst with its own slate of kooky content, including Off-Road Velociraptor Safari. (Note: Flashbang Studios is constantly toying around with ways to distribute and sell its games. At the time of this writing, Off-Road Velociraptor Safari could be played for free only as a Facebook game. If you don't have a Facebook account, try playing another one of the team's creations, like Minotaur China Shop or Time Donkey).

In Off-Road Velociraptor Safari, you play a dinosaur in a pith helmet and a monocle driving a jeep equipped with a deadly spiked ball on a chain (just like in the archaeology textbooks). Your goal is to spin around in your jeep doing tricks and murdering your fellow dinosaurs (obviously).

For many indie game developers and reviewers, Off-Road Velociraptor Safari was their first introduction to Unity. Some reviewers said that they were stunned that a fully 3D game could play in the browser. Other reviewers were a little bummed that the game was sluggish on slower computers. We'll talk about optimization a little later, but it's not too early to keep performance in mind as you start out.

Fewer features, more promise

If you play Off-Road Velociraptor Safari and some of the other games on the Blurst site, you'll get a better sense of what you can do with Unity without a team of experienced Korean MMO developers. The game has 3D models, physics (code that controls how things move around somewhat realistically), collisions (code that detects when things hit each other), music, and sound effects. Just like FusionFall, the game can be played in the browser with the Unity Web Player plugin. Flashbang Studios also sells downloadable versions of its games, demonstrating that Unity can produce standalone executable game files too.

Maybe we should build Off-Road Velociraptor Safari?

Right then! We can't create FusionFall just yet, but we can surely create a tiny game like Off-Road Velociraptor Safari, right? Well... no. Again, this article isn't about crushing your game development dreams. But the fact remains that Off-Road Velociraptor Safari took five supremely talented and experienced guys eight weeks to build on full-time hours, and they've been tweaking and improving it ever since. Even a game like this, which may seem quite small in comparison to full-blown MMO like FusionFall, is a daunting challenge for a solo developer. Put it in a jar up on the shelf, and let's take a look at something you'll have more success with.

Unity 3D Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide

A seat-of-your-pants manual for building fun, groovy little games quickly Build fun games using the free Unity 3D game engine even if you've never coded before Learn how to "skin" projects to make totally different games from the same file – more games, less effort! Deploy your games to the Internet so that your friends and family can play them Packed with ideas, inspiration, and advice for your own game design and development Stay engaged with fresh, fun writing that keeps you awake as you learn

Read more about this book

(For more resources on this subject, see here.)

I bent my Wooglie

Wooglie.com is a Unity game portal hosted by M2H Game Studio in the Netherlands. One glance at the front page will tell you that it's a far different portal than Blurst.com. Many of the Wooglie games are rough around the edges, and lack the sophistication and the slick professional sheen of the games on Blurst. But here is where we'll make our start with Unity. This is exactly where you need to begin as a new game developer, or as someone approaching a new piece of technology like Unity.

Play through a selection of games on Wooglie. I'll highlight a few of them for your interest:

Big Fun Racing

Big Fun Racing is a simple but effective game where you zip around collecting coins in a toy truck. It features a number of different levels and unlockable vehicles. The game designer sunk a few months into the game in his off-hours, with a little help from outsource artists to create the vehicle models.

Diceworks

Diceworks is a very simple, well-polished game designed for the iPhone in Unity 3D. We won't be covering any iPhone development, but it's good to know that your Unity content can be deployed to a number of other devices and platforms, including the Apple iPhone or iPod touch, and the Nintendo Wii. The iPhone and Wii versions of the software cost an additional fee, but you can deploy your games to the Web, to the Mac, and to the PC for free using the indie version of Unity.

Diceworks was created by one artist and one programmer working together as a team. It's rare to find a single person who possesses both programming and artistic talent simultaneously; scientists say that these disciplines are split between two different lobes in our brains, and we tend to favor one or the other. The artist-programmer pairing that produced Diceworks is a common setup in game development. What's your own brain telling you? Are you more comfy with visuals or logic? Art or programming? Once you discover the answer, it's not a bad plan to find someone to make up the other half of your brain so that your game handles both areas competently.

At any event, with Diceworks we're definitely getting closer to the scope and scale that you can manage on your own as you start out with Unity.

It's also interesting to note that Diceworks is a 2D game created in a 3D engine. The third "D" is largely missing, and all of the game elements appear to exist on a flat plane. Nixing that extra dimension when you're just starting out isn't a half bad idea. Adding depth to your game brings a whole new dimension of difficulty to your designs, and it will be easier to get up and running with Unity by focusing on the X and Y axes, and leaving the Z-axis in one of those dream jars. With a few sturdy working game examples under your belt, it won't be long before you can take that Z-jar down off the shelf and pop it open. The games that we'll be dealing with in this article will stick to a two-dimensional plane, using three-dimensional models. Even so, certain games have taken this concept and ran with it: New Super Mario Bros. Wii locked its 3D characters to a 2D plane and wound up an extremely complex and satisfying platformer.

Walk before you can run (or double jump)

A common mistake that new game developers make is biting off more than they can chew. Even experienced game developers make this mistake when they get really excited about a project, or when they approach a new technology and expect to be immediately proficient at using it. The real danger here is that you'll sit down and try to create your dream—let's say it's a sword and sorcery RPG epic that combines all the best parts of Diablo, ChuChu Rocket!, and Microsoft Excel. When you've sunk days and weeks and months into it and it still looks nothing like the game you envisioned, you give up. You figure that since you failed at creating your dream game, you were never really cut out to be a game developer to begin with.

You owe it to yourself to start small! Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither was your dream kart racing game starring famous figures from Roman history. By taking smaller steps, you can experience success with a number of smaller games. Then you can take what you learn and add to it, slowly building your expertise until you're in a position to take that dream game jar off the shelf.

For now, let's keep our dream shelf fully stocked, and turn our attention to something small and achievable. Best would be to have a collection of working games that started out simply, and grew more and more complex as you got smarter.

There are real-world examples of games that began as simple, effective ideas and later grew into enormously complex and feature-rich titles. From small acorns, mighty multiplayer oak tree games grow.

There's no such thing as "finished"

Some game developers who produce content for fixed media such as game discs and cartridges are used to producing a gold master—the final build of the game—and calling it a day. One of the joys of deploying games to the Web is that they're never truly finished. You can continue tweaking your web games and modifying them until you end up with a far more fun and polished game than you started with.

If you follow Flashbang Studios on Twitter or if you read the studio's blog, you'll see that they're constantly modifying and improving their games, even years after they were "finished". At the time of this writing, Off-Road Velociraptor Safari was two years old, and the studio's Twitter stream revealed that they're still actively tweaking the game.

Likewise, we may start with some games that are really raw and unfinished at first. But as we learn more about how to program the crucial bits and pieces common to many games, we'll keep revisiting our rough, early games to add those pieces and improve them.

Stop! Hammer time

Now that you've seen some of what Unity can do, it's time to download the program and kick the tires! Unity indie version is available for the low price of free (at the time of this writing) from the Unity 3D website.

1. Go to http://unity3D.com.
2. Click on the Download Now button.
3. Download the latest version of the Unity 3D authoring tool for your platform—Mac or PC. If you are given the option, make sure to download the sample project along with the program.
4. Follow all the on-screen prompts until the Unity authoring tool has finished installing.
5. Launch Unity!

Explore Demo island

When Unity first opens, you should see a splash screen referring you to different tutorial resources and language guides. How helpful! Now close it. (Don't worry, it'll be there next time, unless you uncheck theShow at Startup box).

Because you chose to download the sample project, it should automatically load the first time you run Unity. Navigate toWindow | Layouts | 2 by 3 to see the different panels that we're about to tour.

To try out the demo, click on the Play button at the top-center of the screen.

You can walk around the Island Demo using the WASD keys on your keyboard. Jump by pressing the Space bar. When you're finished exploring, click on the Play button again to end the demo.

The wonders of technology!

Unity contains all of the tools that you need to create an island similar to the one you see in this demo. It has terrain tools that let you model your level right inside the software. It contains a ready-made First Person Controller Prefab object you can plunk into the world with automatic WASD keyboard controls that will allow you to explore the terrain. Unity automatically takes care of the rendering (drawing), collisions, physics, and sound effects. That's one fancy hammer!

Wide-open worlds with Will
If you'd like to learn how to sculpt your own terrain in Unity, and to add 3D models, sounds, and interactivity to create a simple but functional 3D open-world game, check out, "Unity Game Development Essentials", Will Goldstone, Packt Publishing.

Much of what you see in the Island Demo can be built directly in Unity using the engine's terrain sculpting tools. The demo contains special models, like the bridge, which were imported from 3D software packages, including 3D Studio Max, Maya, or Blender. Certain elements, like the birds, have scripts attached to them that teach them how to fly. Scripts are lists of instructions that tell the items in the game world how to behave.

Let's take a quick look around the Unity interface and note a few points of interest.

Unity 3D Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide

A seat-of-your-pants manual for building fun, groovy little games quickly Build fun games using the free Unity 3D game engine even if you've never coded before Learn how to "skin" projects to make totally different games from the same file – more games, less effort! Deploy your games to the Internet so that your friends and family can play them Packed with ideas, inspiration, and advice for your own game design and development Stay engaged with fresh, fun writing that keeps you awake as you learn

Read more about this book

(For more resources on this subject, see here.)

The Scene window

The Scene window is where you can position your Game Objects and move things around. This window has various controls to change its level of detail. Use these controls to toggle lighing on and off, and to display the window contents with textures, wireframes, or a combination of both. You can use the colorful gizmo in the top-right corner to constrain the window to the X, Y, and Z axes to view the top and sides of your scene. Click on the white box in the middle to return to perspective view. This is what the Scenewindow looks like when you start a new project or create a new Scene. You can think of scenes as levels or stages in your game.

The Game window

The Game window shows you what your players will see. When you click on the Play button to test your game (as you just did with the Island Demo), the results of your efforts play out in this window. Toggle theMaximize on Play button to test your game in full-screen mode.

The Hierarchy

The Hierarchy panel lists all of the Game Objects in your Scene. Game Objects—cameras, lights, models, and prefabs—are the things that make up your game. They can be "tangible" things like the birds and the bridge in the Island Demo. They can also include intangible things, which only you as the game developer get to see and play with, such as the cameras, the lights, and colliders, which are special invisible shapes that tell the game engine when two Game Objects are touching.

The Island Demo Hierarchy contains Game Objects for the birds, the sea foam, the terrain, and the sun, to name a few. It also lists something called the First Person Controller Prefab, which has one of those invisible Colliders with a camera stuck to it. That's how the player can see the island. The demo lists something called Performance—an empty Game Objectwith a special script at ached to it that helps the demo run more quickly depending on the player's computer specs. So,Game Objects can include touchy-feely "physical" objects like birds and bridges, as well as behind-the-scenes intangible things like lights, cameras, and actions (scripts).

Click on a Game Object in the Hierarchy panel, and then hover your mouse over the Scene window. Press the F key on your keyboard, and the Scene window will automatically pan and zoom directly to that object. Alternatively, you can go to Edit | Frame Selected, which can be more reliable than using the keyboard shortcut. (I like to think of the F as standing for Focus to help me remember what this shortcut does).

The Project panel

he Project panel lists all of the elements that you'll use to create Game Objects in your project. For example, the Island Demo seagull Game Object is made up of a mesh that represents the seagull's shape, a material to depict its "skin" or coloring, and a script that controls its flight behavior. The seagull material itself could include a texture (image) file. All of these goodies are listed in the Project panel.

You got a lot of gull
The actual seagulls in the Island Demo are actually more complex than the ones in our simple example. To see what went into creating them, click on the gray arrow next to Birdsin the Project panel. Then click on the arrow next to Seagull. Don't worry if you don't understand what you're seeing—the key here is to understand that the Project panel contains many of the elements, or ingredients, that go into making our Game Objects.

The Project panel displays the contents of a special folder called Assets. Unity automatically creates theAssets folder for you when you create a new project. If you drag a compatible file, like a 3D model, a sound effect, or an image into the Projectpanel, Unity copies it to the Assets folder behind the scenes, and displays it in the Project panel.

Don't mess with the Assets folder!
Unity stores metadata about the folder, and by moving stuff around or deleting things through your operating system, you may break your project. If you need to make changes, make them right inside Unity in the Projectpanel.

The Inspector

The Inspector is a context-sensitive panel, which means that it changes depending on what you select elsewhere in Unity. This is where you can adjust the position, rotation, and scale of Game Objects listed in the Hierarchy panel. The Inspectorcan also display controls to configure components that add functionality to Game Objects. Between the three main panels in Unity (Hierarchy, Project, andInspector), the Inspector is where you'll likely spend most of your time because that's where you'll be tweaking and fiddling with every aspect of the elements that comprise your game projects.

This screenshot of the Inspector shows the components attached to the First Person Controller Prefabin the Island Demo: two scripts (FPSWalker and Mouse Look) and a Character Controller component. To see the same content on your computer, click to select the First Person Controller Prefab in theHierarchy panel.

Invade Island Demo as a paratrooper

Let's use the Inspector panel to make a quick change to the start position of the player character. We'll begin the demo with the player 400 feet in midair, giving the player a beautiful bird's eye view of the action as he parachutes into the island.

The First Person Controller Prefab that you just clicked on represents the player in the game. It has a camera embedded in it that the player looks through, and a pill-shaped Character collider that tells the game engine when the player is touching other things in the Scene. The Character collider is what keeps the player from falling through the ground.

We can use the Inspector panel to change the start position of the player. In the Scene view, you should see the First Person Controller Prefab—it looks like a green pill with what looks like a speaker icon on top of it (this is blocking the Camera icon). If you don't see it, follow these steps:

1. Click to select the First Person Controller Prefab in the Hierarchy panel.
2. Navigate to Edit | Frame Selected to focus on the Game Object. Alternatively, you can hover your mouse over theScene view and press the F key on your keyboard. The First Person Controller Prefab should swing into view.
3. Click on the Move button, which looks like four connected arrows.
   

   

   A tripod of three arrows appears at the center of the Game Object. The blue Z- axis runs through where the player's belly button would be. The red X-axis runs perpendicular to the X-axis. And the green Y-axis runs straight up and down through the player as if the player was hanging by a piece of string tied to the top of her head. The Y-axis is the up or down axis that we want to adjust.

   

4. You can click-and-drag the green Y-axis arrow to move the player up into the sky, but a better method is to change the Y-axis position in the Inspector panel. Expand the gray arrow next toTransform in the Inspector panel if it's not already open, and change the Y value underPosition to 400.
   

   

5. Now, when you press Play to test the game, your character will start way up in the sky, floating down to the island before making a soft, quiet landing. It's a good thing that the Unity people didn't write a fall damage script, otherwise we might have some crumpled legs to contend with!

Layers and layout dropdowns

Above the Inspector panel, you'll see the Layers and Layout dropdowns. Game Objects can be grouped into layers, much like in Photoshop or Flash. Unity stores a few commonly used layouts in the Layoutdropdown. You can also save and load your own custom layouts.

Playback controls

These three buttons help you test your game and control playback. As you've seen, the Play button starts and stops your game. The Pause button works as expected—it pauses your game so that you can make changes to it on the fly. The third button is a Step-Through control; use it to advance frame-by-frame through your game so that you can more tightly control what's going on.

Changes you make while testing don't stick!
One of the more surprising features of Unity is that you can make changes to Game Objects and variables on the fly while you're testing your game. But it's important to know that the changes you make during testing will not "stick". Once you stop testing your game, the changes that you made during testing will revert to the state they were in before you clicked on the Play button. It's disheartening to make a number of changes to your game, only to realize that the Play button was on the entire time, and your changes will be lost. One way to avoid this problem is to toggle the Maximize on Play button in the Gamewindow so that you'll be more aware of when you're testing and when you're not.

Scene controls

At the top-left of your screen, you'll see four controls that help you move around your Scene, and positionGame Objects within it. These controls are mapped to the Q, W, E, and R keys on your keyboard. From left to right, they are:

• The Hand tool (Q): Use it to click-and-drag around your scene. Hold down the Alt key on your keyboard to rotate the view. Hold down the Ctrl key (Windows) or the Command key (Apple) to zoom in and out. Your mouse wheel will also zoom the scene. Hold down the Shift key to pan, zoom, and rotate in larger increments to speed things up. This is a way for you to navigate around the game world. It doesn't actually impact the way the player sees the game. To modify the Game view, you need to use the Moveor Rotate tools to modify the Camera position.
• The Move tool (W): This tool lets you move the Game Objects around your scene. You can either drag the object(s) around by the X, or Y, or Z-axis handles, or by the square in the center for freeform movement. Holding down the Ctrl key will snap movement to set grid increments. We saw this tool when we were positioning the First Person Controller Prefab in the middle of the sky.
• Rotate tool (E): Use it to spin your objects around using a neat spherical gizmo. The red, green, and blue lines map to the X, Y, and Z axes.
• Scale tool (R): This tool works much the same as the Move and Rotate tools. Use it to make your Game Objects larger or smaller. Dragging an X, Y, or Z handle will non-uniformly scale (squash and stretch) the object, while dragging the gray cube in the center will uniformly scale it.

Don't stop there—live a little!

We've glanced briefly at the key elements of the Unity interface, but there's no need to stop poking around. Far beyond the scope of this article, there is a wealth of menu options, buttons, and controls that we haven't covered. Why not explore those menus or start randomly clicking on things that you don't yet understand? Now is the time to safely break stuff. You didn't work hard to create the Island Demo, so why not mess around with it a little bit?

Here are some things to try:

• Select some of the Game Objects in the Hierarchy panel and move them around in the Scene window using the Scenecontrols. What happens when you put the bridge in the middle of the sky? Can you make one of the birds fly into a tree? What happens when you walk way out into the ocean while testing the game?
• Randomly right-click in the three different panels and read through the context menu options to see what you're getting yourself into.
• Poke around in the GameObject | Create Other menu. There's a whole list of interesting things that you can add to this scene without even touching the 3D modeling program.
• What happens when you delete the lights from the scene? Or the camera? Can you add another camera? More lights? How does that affect the Scene?
• Can you move the First Person Controller Prefab to another part of the island to change your starting position? How about starting on top of those two gigantic rocks on the beach?
• Can you replace the audio files to make the seagulls sound like car horns?
• Download a picture of kittens from the Internet and see if you can wrap it around the boulder model. Kittens rock! You can pull the kittens into your project using the Assets | Import New Asset option in the menu.

A tuner's paradise
The Unity 3D interface is designed to be customized. Not only can you define your own custom window layouts, but you can even write custom scripts to make certain buttons and panels appear inside Unity to speed up your workflow. That kind of thing is well beyond the scope of this article, but if you're the kind of person who really likes to get under the hood, you'll be happy to know that you can tweak Unity 3D to your heart's content—maybe add a few racing stripes and install an enormous pair of subwoofers in the back?

Summary

This article was all about getting a feel for what Unity can do and for what the program interface had to offer. Here's what we found out:

• Massive 80 person teams, all the way down to tiny one- or two-person teams are using Unity to create fun games.
• By thinking small, we'll have more success in learning Unity and producing fully functional games instead of huge but half-baked abandoned projects.
• Different flavors of Unity help us deploy our games to different platforms. By using the free indie version, we can deploy to the Web, and the Mac and PC platforms.
• The Unity interface has controls and panels that let us visually compose our game assets, and test games on the fly right inside the program!

I hope you've taken some time to thoroughly vandalize the Island Demo. Save the file by clicking on File | Save Project in case you want to come back and wreak more havoc a little later.

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Further resources on this subject:

Unity 3D Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide

A seat-of-your-pants manual for building fun, groovy little games quickly Build fun games using the free Unity 3D game engine even if you've never coded before Learn how to "skin" projects to make totally different games from the same file – more games, less effort! Deploy your games to the Internet so that your friends and family can play them Packed with ideas, inspiration, and advice for your own game design and development Stay engaged with fresh, fun writing that keeps you awake as you learn

About the Author :

Ryan Henson Creighton

Ryan is the founder of Untold Entertainment Inc., a boutique game development studio in the heart of downtown Toronto. Ryan got his start at a Canadian television broadcaster creating small, simple games for kids and preschoolers. By the time he was through, he had built over fifty games for a wide range of clients including McDonalds, Hasbro, Lego, Proctor and Gamble, Nickelodeon, and the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. These games ran the gamut from simple slider puzzles, memory games, and contest entry mechanics to tile-based graphic adventure games and massively multiplayer virtual worlds. Ryan often leveraged his theatre background to perform on-camera in promotional spots for Microsoft and Nintendo. He spent a number of years moonlighting as a video game journalist under the cartoonish moniker "MrSock".

Ryan founded Untold Entertainment Inc. in 2007 and has continued to develop great kids' content with broadcasters and independent television producers to help extend their on-air brands online. He packs the company's popular blog with tutorials, designer diaries, and insights into the world of independent game development, employing his signature biting wit and ludicrous photo captions.

Through Untold Entertainment, Ryan is developing a number of original properties, which include: Interrupting Cow Trivia, an online multiplayer trivia game; Spellirium, a word puzzle/adventure game hybrid; UGAGS, the Untold Graphic Adventure Game System; and Kahoots, a fun crime-themed puzzle game modeled entirely in clay.

Ryan lives and bikes around downtown Toronto with his wife Cheryl, and his two tiny daughters Cassandra and Isabel.