Unity Will Groom 80,000 Game Developers With Education Initiative

Unity Technologies hopes to groom 80,000 people for game jobs over three years with an education initiative aimed at helping people learn how to program and develop games. From a report: Unity is paying for this program with help from its initial public offering, in which it raised $1.3 billion at a $13.6 billion valuation in September. At the time, it set aside 750,000 shares for the Unity Social Impact fund. That is valued at $83.6 million today, and part of it will be used for the education goal. I think of this as enlightened self-interest. By training people how to use its tools, Unity creates new customers for its game engine, which is the most popular tool for building games. Unity's Jessica Lindl said in an interview with GamesBeat that the company will create learning experiences to help people create a game portfolio, get Unity Certified, and prepare for a new job. "We've formalized a long company philosophy that the world is a better place with more creators in it," Lindl said. "This strategy is around how we are empowering our employees and our creators to foster a more inclusive and sustainable world." The COVID-19 pandemic has created a global recession that has left millions of people around the world out of work. So Unity hopes to address that with an alternative, no-cost path to employment with the launch of "career pathways."

Stop changing API to start.

[Shotgun]

I tried using their system to write a couple 3D games a while back. The frustrating part was that every instructional video seem to contradict the rest. Anything outside of their simple tutorials seemed impossible. Does this mean that we will have 80K developers all writing the same simple game?

Re: Stop changing API to start.

[NoSleepDemon]

This is my frustration with Unity as well. Not only does the API change frequently, but many of the tools just plain suck out of the box. The Mechanim animator is a good example of that, the UI is horrific to use, and doing something as simple as calling functions at key frames is needlessly difficult. Then we have my current frustration - overloading the rendering of UI inspectors for custom data types. As you said there are many contradictory ways to do things, and the instructional stuff doesn't explain anything passed basic concepts. I've found myself attempting to resort to old methods of doing things just because I don't have the desire to fart around with whatever stupid idea the developers have tried to implement with this particular release. I actually met some of the developers at a conference a couple years ago, and I came loaded with questions on best practices - how *they* envisioned certain common game design concepts might be realised with Unity. For example, how and where would you store a game manager type class, which persists from scene to scene and implements functionality for saving and loading game state? How would this game manager come into being if you load the game from an initialization scene vs a specific level (e.g. To quickly test something). Their answers were fucking useless, they basically didn't know and I foolishly led with my own theorised best approach, which they parroted back to me.

Re: Stop changing API to start.

[CaptainLugnuts]

I spent 17 years in game development and before that four years working with cell based animation.

I can tell you this, if you are trying to drive AI/gameplay from animations you are doing it wrong.

It's tolerable if all you want to do is trigger a sound effect but with variable frame rates and the possibility of skipping frames on playback expecting a reliable trigger is farcical. Sure, you can execute all triggers between displayed frames but that leads to other problems when someone invariably puts critical and conflicting decision making in those triggers.

Putting triggers into the animations leads to shitty animation transitions and controller lag like all EA games have that use ANT. It also makes the gameplay art dependent which is terrible. If you're writing a sportsball game you should be able to have the game work perfectly with 2D X and O as the player art. The state of the game should be best-effort rendered by the animation system as opposed to the state of the animation system doing best-effort gameplay.

In short, making things you shouldn't be doing difficult is probably a bunch of good API decisions by the unity developers.

Re: Stop changing API to start.

[NoSleepDemon]

It was for animation specific events, not AI or logic, that would be retarded. Examples would be invulnerability frames, launching projectiles, or landing hits. None of those should trigger any issues with animation, and all of those should happen on a near perfect frame by frame basis. Frames with events in absolutely should fire even if those frames would be skipped by the next animation update.

Re:

[CaptainLugnuts]

This is exactly what I was warning the OP about.

It's a terrible idea to key anything having to do with gameplay to animations.

Let's say you designed your animations to run at 60fps. You've locked the game to vertical refresh to ensure good synchronization. The person playing the game setup the monitor to be at 72Hz. Your carefully crafted timing is now broken.

Animation frames are not reliable indicators of time in a game, full stop.

For over a decade I worked as a low level graphics driver, platform opti

Re: Stop changing API to start.

[NoSleepDemon]

OK so why are your animations locked to frame rate? They should be framerate independent. How else would you synchronise the actions of a model with events, if not by trigger frames in an animation? What else would you measure to decide when a character performs damage during a weapon swing? And why aren't your animations also tied to this?

Re:

[CaptainLugnuts]

Your animations are not locked to frame rate, they are locked to a clock. There will be weird temporal aliasing when display framerate doesn't match animated framerate. Yes, you interpolate everything so the motion is smooth, but the events are not interpolated.

Everything should be specified to time, tuning gameplay becomes simple and repeatable and doesn't involve animators or the art pipeline.

Re: Stop changing API to start.

[NoSleepDemon]

Well yes your events would involve animators and the art pipeline, they are supposed to be synchronized to what you see happening on screen, what actions characters are taking. An animator is going to design the swing of a weapon on a character for example, and they are going to work to some set of specifications. They will place events on an animation timeline and those events will be synchronized to the position of the animation. If you lock animation to a clock, no matter whether that clock is at a fixed

Re:

[BAReFO0t]

Fuck it and go Godot engine.
All the code there for you to edit. No licensing issues, no costs, and the code makes sense to begin with. I added some advanced physics functions after five minutes of browsing the source and reading a few functions.

Re: Stop changing API to start.

[NoSleepDemon]

Godot is something I have been meaning to give a go at, having the source is a huge plus. My experience with Unity is that it will get me 90% of the way to where I want to be, but the last 10% is almost insurmountable due to piss poor design decisions in the engine. At work, we (my team) try to avoid third party libraries for this reason. With C++ we use stl and boost obviously, plus direct3d because them's the rules. Javascript stuff on the other hand is as bare bones as can be, the only library we use the

Re:

[SirSlud]

Unity is still a relatively young engine (as game engines go.) As such it's gone through a fair amount of evolution in a fairly short time. That said, it's a pretty easy engine to get around in. If you're coming at it as a near beginner (ie, tinkering level) to game programming using middleware, you'd benefit from a structured instruction that was based on a fixed (and probably relatively recent) version of the Unity pipeline. If you have more experience in engines, it becomes easier to recognize in what wa

Looking for a stable API?

[OrangeTide]

DOSbox 0.74 has kept the same API since May 12, 2010. Maybe haul out an old copy of Watcom C/C++ or a new copy of nasm and start coding up games for a platform that has been ported to Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, OSX, BeOS, RiscOS [sourceforge.net], Android, iOS, PSP, GP2x, OS/2, AmigaOS, Wii, Dreamcast [dosbox.com], JavaScript [sourceforge.net], ...

The more bleeding edge you want to be, the more work it will be to keep your software development dependencies up-to-date. There are other options that are more of a middle ground than my (somewhat flippant) example above.

Re:

[DontBeAMoran]

The better question would be, is the market in need of 80K new game developers?
Or is this yet another attempt to lower the salaries of everyone involved?

Re:

[tlhIngan]

The better question would be, is the market in need of 80K new game developers?
Or is this yet another attempt to lower the salaries of everyone involved?

Doesn't lower salaries when there are tons of people wanting a game development job that you can pay minimum wage.

Granted things are better since EA Spouse but you're still talking about a field where if you leave, your replacement will be sitting down while the chair is still warm.

The real reason though is marketing - if you have a ready pool of Unity deve

Lessons

[unixcorn]

Seems they are taking a lesson from Apple who has been, for years, offering steep discounts to educational programs.
I also agree with the self serving aspect of this. But that's not really all that great for the students. Just because you are trained and have a skill set does not mean you are going to get a job doing what you aspire to. Living in a college town, where I get served at restaurants by PHD candidates, is proof.

Hard to tell what's a bigger waste of your life...

[zawarski]

...playing video games or making them?

Re:Hard to tell what's a bigger waste of your life

[elcor]

Commenting on slashdot

Re:

[DontBeAMoran]

You know what's worst than commenting on slashdot? Commenting on slashdot and not adding anything worthwhile to the discussion.

Oh wait.

Re:

[BAReFO0t]

Well, for-profit "games", definitely.

The point of games is actually that they are the natural form and mother of all education, art, entertainment and sports.
Playing. Like kids and dogs do. Training for the real world.
Which is essential for healthy human development.

Obviously,
those who can, do.
Those who can't play.
(Those who can't play, spectate... yes Twitch users... looking at you.)

Also obviously, what the industry has done does not resemble that at all.
It merely gives you that feeling. With virtual educa

Re:

[gweihir]

...playing video games or making them?

Well, I guess you also do not read and eating is probably a tasteless pill for you. My condolences to you for not having found out what life is about.

"Groom" ? Really ?

[greytree]

Did absolutely no-one think that that was an unfortunate choice of words ?

Re:

[Kitkoan]

"Groom", verb, meaning "to prepare or train (someone) for a particular purpose or activity."

I think it was the proper word to use here. What would you have suggested?

Re:"Groom" ? Minors

[Anonymous Coward]

Grooming minors is probably what parent post and any parent would be concerned about.

Re:

[Kitkoan]

I could see that as an issue if it said anything about children. But all I'm seeing is "game developers", and "people", not "children", "child", "kid", or High School or below students.

Re:

[Hognoxious]

Except it doesn't say that, does it? Perhaps they (and you) should learn to read.

Re:

[greytree]

Except the phrase most commonly used is "online groomong" and that is what is precisely being done here.
Maybe you should learn to comprehend.
And not be such a rude cunt.

Re:

[greytree]

Like it or not, "grooming" someone online now has a very different meaning to the one intended.
An editor - anyone sensible - would realise this and use another word.

Looking forward to the "Death March" module!

[OzPeter]

Although it will be a hard slog, all the students will appreciate the super long hours they need to put in for this module.

I also expect the module that follows it ("I'm burnt out, what do I do now?") to be a hot topic of discussion.

80,000 burger flippers

[GRYB Ranix]

at least working in fast food or retail is better than working crunch time at EA

Not burger flippers, future Barista

[Dareth]

Making good coffee/espresso is a useful skill for a developer. They can all fight for the two or three open barista spots at the local coffee shop if this doesn't work out.

Re:

[thomst]

GRYB Ranix opined:

at least working in fast food or retail is better than working crunch time at EA

You've obviously never worked the lunchtime rush at a fast food franchise.

Flipping bits for a living beats the living shit out of flipping burgers, even if you have a pointy-haired, EA boss to manage ...

Re:

[bn-7bc]

Untill the googke connected IoT barista robitsctake over, they might not mske the best coffie ever,but they make your coffie the way you want, and it tastes the same wether you are in Paris or Chernobyl, and it costs the restaurant owner way less / day then the current human barista ( at lest model 3 will) , not today but in 5-10 years

Negativity

[backslashdot]

Seriously? All you underachievers pooh poohing this is hilarious. Many great and popular games in the various app stores have been developed in Unity so clearly it's not impossible to make stuff with it. Hey they are offering a way for people interested in game development the chance to get into it for free .. why is that bad? If you aren't interested in being a game developer then go fuck yourself in a corner or something.

If everyone is out of work

[OrangeTide]

How will people in a recession afford luxuries like games? Especially when we can suffer through a billion free games filled with ads. Sorry but game development is not recession-proof.

Re:

[OrangeTide]

A recession is a period of declining economic performance across an entire economy that lasts for several months. It doesn't mean too much on a nation-wide or global scale when you find a few places of growth is there is more decline than growth. The for every high paying jobs that you and I find because of our skills, there are multiple people (dozens?) that aren't paying their rent right now.

Norms

[cygnusvis]

They mean 80k normies who might become devs

Re:

[Hognoxious]

79k of them will be in India.

URGENT Pls kind guru's, I am having one doubt about what is the quiternian's ...

Unreal is teh bettar!

[Hognoxious]

Popcorn time!

Re:

[Areyoukiddingme]

Unreal is teh bettar!

Popcorn time!

I have mod points at the moment, and would have modded you up, except Slashdot today is so apathetic we can't even get a good religious flame war going.

Install Godot Engine, be done with it.

[BAReFO0t]

Fuck Unity. They're still not even Linux friendly
Try Godot. 29MB download (I'm serious), no costs *ever*, does what Unity does, but with a BSD license, easily modifiable engine code, nice tutorials due to very elegant software design, and brutally smart developers. Current goal: Put Unreal Engine to shame.
Never look back.

https://godotengine.org/ [godotengine.org]

80,000?!?

[MSTCrow5429]

How many people does the game industry, maybe only in the US, employ now? How are start-ups and small studios faring? If you want a cool hobby or maybe even make a few bucks (at a penny or less per hour worked), it's a great idea, and it's free to learn too! But don't think it will give you a "career," except maybe for a few hundred really talented, really driven people.

Who hires people that do short courses like this?

[zkiwi34]

As in, what makes people who do this sort of course desirable to hire?

Re:

[gweihir]

As in, what makes people who do this sort of course desirable to hire?

You are asking the wrong question. Obviously nobody hires them. Or maybe a small number gets to do these inane "corporate training" things. But most will never get a worthwhile job out of this, obviously.

The right question to ask is what do those that offer these courses get out of it.

Re:

[EnsilZah]

I'm an artist and a coder in the animation and VFX industry.
While having completed a course like that as my only qualification would probably not help me get hired, having some experience with Unity or Unreal would probably be a bonus point for my next job application as the industry moves to real-time rendering, virtual production, and would probably expand my opportunities in related fields like gaming and VR.

I'm actually in the process of learning Unreal right now because the decision has been made that

This looks good for Middle School

[Hasaf]

I was just looking through the lessons and this looks approachable for my students as an elective activity. It looks good enough that I am going to have the IT department install the software (I am not allowed to install software). I hope to have some test runs through it, with students, next semester.

One of the reasons I like this is that the student can see something happen in a manner that looks engaging, Unlike the Python lessons that produces output that just ails to engage the students.

great

[TonyBeals]

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