ROCHESTER, NEW YORK — Workinman Interactive LLC, a veteran game and connected toy development agency, announced today their support for Unity Engine’s new ECS technology and the new levels of services it enables for developers, starting with Playable Advertisements and Games in Messaging Apps.
What is Unity’s new ECS technology?
Unity’s new Entity Component System is a pattern of design that is most typically found in games and more easily allows for the management of all the concurrent components happening in a game scene. It’s also a great opportunity for optimization of engine components, assets, and memory. Unity’s new 2018 technology pushes heavily into ECS design patterns and enables developers like Workinman Interactive to strip games down to only the components needed. The result: highly compact games.
What does it mean for games?
Smaller, Lighter, and Faster games. The smaller, efficient runtimes this enables, combined with Unity’s new advanced asset compression means that we can now make tiny, uncompromising games, and fit them on a wealth of new devices, from entry-level mobile phones, to wearables, IoT appliances, and Toys. It is especially beneficial for where compactness matters the most: on the web.
Playable Advertisements
Compact games, clocking in at under 1 megabyte, are perfect for loading as a part of a website. Advertisements load a game demo almost instantly, giving players the ability to try immediately before they buy. The best part: the new Unity tech utilizes HTML5 technology, so the user doesn’t need a plugin to run the game like in days past. They don’t need to install it. They just tap and they are instantly playing the game.
Lightweight playable content is not only a revolutionary way to get a playable demo instantly into the hands of potential customers, these interactive ads can be used as a method of engagement for advertisements across all markets, not just games. In an era where browser ads are considered bulky performance killers and audiences either learn to tune them out, or block them altogether, advertisers need new methods of attracting and engaging with viewers. Ultra-light games that quickly fold out of advertisements could offer rich and rewarding experiences to the end-user and begin to change that trend.
Games in Messaging Apps
Messaging apps, such as Facebook Messenger or iMessage, are the perfect place for these tiny games and activities. While the messaging app market is flooded with many small tools, they can be pretty basic due to limitations from the messaging client. Compact Unity games can change that, allowing developers to create rich experiences that are smaller than they typical app. Game demos could be sent over iMessage, or the back-and-froth nature of the platform can enable a wealth of turn-based games that run within the chat window.
IoT and the Future
With the launch of the new technology, Unity is targeting Playable Advertisements and Messaging Apps, but have outlined a vision for these lightweight games to be ideal for running on Internet of Things (IoT) appliances. This makes total sense as IoT devices are built to have the bare minimum amount of resources in the hardware itself. Having games with light footprints that can be pre-installed in memory, or stream over the network can greatly expand the versatility of those devices, and open up a new era of IoT appliances that can play games.
Workinman Interactive and Unity Engine
Tapped to develop one of the first Playable Advertisements for Unity’s 2018 GDC reveal, Workinman Interactive has advanced their understanding of the technology. Workinman’s 11+ year history of being one of the premier web game development studios also puts them in a unique position to tackle both the Unity and HTML5 ends of this new technology. More information on Workinman’s Multi-platform Game Development Services can be found here.
