[Dev News] Unity Announce Unity Spark Game Engine

[xSicKxBot]

As part of the announcement of Google Labs launching Google Playground, a new site for creating and sharing games, Unity spark was revealed. Unity Spark is a new Unity game engine, clearly powered by Unity technology, aimed at making game creation as simple as possible. As it stands now, Unity Spark only creates games for Google Playground, but it is an independent tool and could author stand alone games in the future. It is also a separate product with a separate target audience than the full Unity game engine.

On the Unity blog Unity CEO Matt Bromberg described Spark accordingly:

Today, together with our partners at Google, we announced Unity Spark – a new way for people to come together to make and share games right in their browser, no prior Unity or game development experience required.

This isn’t about “one-shotting”. Asking AI to regurgitate an already invented game does not make you the next Hideo Kojima, any more than re-typing the first paragraph of War and Peace in your word processor makes you Tolstoy.

Unity Spark is about being able to create real, unique interactive experiences. To build something worth working on, polishing, and sharing. It’s about using the new technology to enable more people to express themselves. And it all begins with the game art. Unity Spark connects directly to the Unity Asset Store, so you can build with thousands of high-quality, artist-created assets made by our community.

We made Unity Spark for the gamers who have spent a thousand hours inside a genre and know exactly what’s missing. The graphic artist who wants to bring their vision to life but doesn’t know how to code. Modders who now want to create something entirely new. That’s the opportunity we see: Folks with real creative conviction who can now fulfill their full potential.

Will some graduate to become professionals in our industry? Will some current professionals use Unity Spark as well to explore new ideas? We certainly hope both are true. We’ll see. One thing is certain: Trying to build a real game for yourself will only deepen the respect you have for the people who apply the art and craft of gamemaking at the highest level.

Making even rudimentary interactive entertainment is very hard, demanding expertise in many crafts – narrative, design, art, sound, UI, level design, front-and-back end development, systems design, scripting, just to name a few. Producing a polished experience of your own has long been beyond the capabilities of most people.

As a consequence, although about 3 billion people play a game made with Unity each month, almost none of them have ever made one. Electronic games are the last major form of entertainment that nearly everyone consumes but almost nobody creates. That’s something we’d like to help change.

We don’t know exactly who will walk through this door, or what they’ll make. That’s the whole point. Democratizing game creation is Unity’s founding mission. Unity Spark was incubated in that spirit. We can’t wait to see what you build together.

Key Links

Unity Spark Homepage

Google Playground

Unity Spark Blog Post

Google Playground Blog Post

You can learn more about Unity Spark and Google Playground in the below. Once Unity spark is available in beta I will cover it in more depth.