Boston Unity Group (B.U.G)

There is a new game developers group in Boston, MA called Boston Unity Group (or B.U.G). It is being put together by Elliott Mitchell and Alex Schwartz. This group plans to meet about every 2 months and focuses on the Unity game engine.

The first meetup of this group was last weekend June 12th and I had the pleasure of attending it over at Northeastern University. It was good to get out and meet with some people from the Boston area into game development/Unity. I was actually surprised at the number of people who attended and the number of other game development groups in Boston, it has a much bigger game development community then I thought.

The day was broken up into 2 main parts, both lead by Tom Higgins, Unity Technology's Product Evangelist. The first part of the day Tom went through the history of the company and how the Unity game engine came to be. After that he then talked about the new features that are coming in Unity 3 due out this summer (and not the Oct. "summer" like the past "summer releases") and even showed a few of the features on the latest Unity 3 build. Right before lunch we also had people in attendance show off some of their work and some of the stuff was pretty cool.

After lunch started a 3-4 hour hands-on introduction into the basics of Unity. It was a pretty good overview of the basics of getting around Unity's interface and also went over some of the Lerpz tutorial too. It was pretty basic stuff that I had already gone over, but still a very good presentation by Tom.

Overall it was a great day. I think it really helped me get re-engerized about working with Unity and working on my game (maybe I will have something to show myself next time). For those who are interested, the next meetup it going to be August 31st at the Microsoft N.E.R.D. center.

Oh, I almost forgot, Tom even answered the hot topic question about Unity and the changes to the iOS 4 developer agreement which is... you probably guessed it, they are still waiting to hear back from Apple (personally my hopes are high with Unity being compatible with iOS 4 as is).