Utah Unity User Group Meets

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 14, 2015

Last night was the inaugural Utah Unity User Group (with the rather amusing acronym UUUG). I found it even more informative than I expected.

The group included experienced Unity users as well as interested newcomers, so the skill level was pretty varied.

Jeff Postma’s formal presentation on Unity’s new 2D tools was  valuable as expected, since I have been using a third-party library and haven’t really done any research on what the new system is like. This was a useful introduction to how it all works. Maybe it wasn’t useful to some of the old hands, but I appreciated the overview.

I ended up showing the demo for Frayed Knights 2, which I wasn’t expecting. I realized I had my laptop in the trunk of my car, which had a somewhat older build than the one I’d used at Salt Lake Gaming Con. It might have been the build from ToshoCon or slightly earlier. Either way, it doesn’t run very well on my 5-year-old laptop (which was a refurb when I got it), which is disappointing. I seem to recall an earlier version running faster, but maybe that was in a simpler level.

I also got to play another Unity game that was whipped up in apparently just a couple of weeks. I’m sorry, I totally forgot the name of it though. Something like Alien Landers or something like that. It’s a WIP name anyway, but the game was pretty fun to play.

As is usual with these kinds of events, the best part is actually talking to other people and swapping thoughts, sharing ideas, and just getting to know who’s who in the community. I guess that is called “networking” which makes it sound much more formal and intimidating than it really is, for those new to this kind of thing. For the most part, we had fun swapping “war stories” and talking games, and any excuse to do this rates high in my book.

We have to be a little careful, because with all these meetings and events happening here in the Salt Lake City area to support indie game developers (Utah Indie Night, UDEN, this, and some of the other things popping up) we could actually swamp our prime development time, and there’s actually some challenge making sure these events don’t conflict with each other and with major events happening elsewhere. But I take it as a sign that the game development community here in Utah – and the software development community in general in the area – is thriving and growing.

Good times!

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