Big-win made with Unity games in 2024
It’s been a fantastic year for games – the breadth, range, and sheer creativity of what the gaming community created has been totally inspiring. Want proof? Look no further than Mike Saver’s monthly made with Unity game posts (here’s the most recent November edition), and stay tuned for his full-year roundup later this month.
Check out some of the amazing stories behind these games and the developers who built them in this round-up of our video profiles, deep-dive case studies, and blog feature articles from 2024.
Deep-dive videos
We sat down with industry legend Raph Koster at Unite 2024 in Barcelona, Spain, to talk about Stars Reach, a massive sandbox MMO game. Learn how the Playable Worlds team is using the Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS), Netcode for Entities, the Universal Render Pipeline (URP), and Unity’s extensible Engine to solve complex problems and create a massive living game world.
This year, as we released Unity 6, we doubled down on our commitment to fully test and dogfood our new tech in production before including new tech in releases. Stratton Studios has been an amazing partner in this, and in this short clip, managing director Josh Loveridge shares his insights about performance and stability while building and shipping four games in Unity 6 pre-release.
In the same series, Josh Loveridge talks about how he approaches building multiplayer games in Unity 6, from open-world sandbox games like TCG World to innovative networked web3 titles like PGA Tour Rise.
Technical case studies
Starting with Apple Arcade, Light Brick Studio’s LEGO® Builder’s Journey, a multiplatform puzzle game, has consistently built momentum – and with this new port, the team has entered the new era of spatial computing.
Read the case study to learn how they overcame rendering and optimization issues when bringing their game to Apple Vision Pro. Mikkel Fredborg, the studio’s technical lead, provides a lot of great insight on problem solving and adapting during game development.
Synth Riders, an immersive rhythm game, launched on Steam VR and Meta Quest in 2019, and it’s since been ported to numerous devices, including Apple Vision Pro.
This case study explores how the studio reimagined the beloved game melding their cyberpunk aesthetic with Apple’s minimalistic and colorful design. It also covers how they conquered overhead and rendering challenges to meet the platform’s day-one launch deadline.
Ready, Set, Cook! is a cooperative cooking and serving game for Messenger built by Coatsink, the studio behind Jurassic World Aftermath and Transformers: Battlegrounds. It was originally built as a desktop web game, and when the team pivoted development to target mobile, they collaborated with Meta and Unity.
Explore this case study for more information on how the team optimized the game and significantly reduced its web load time.
Kasama: The Awakening is an episodic, story-driven, web-based adventure game. To create this game for the web, the team needed to optimize performance across devices while maintaining high visual fidelity.
Read the case study to learn how the team built a visually stunning and emotionally engaging experience on the web.
To create Breachers, the lean team at Triangle Factory need to unify the fragmented VR hardware landscape to power a 5v5 VR FPS with cross-play connectivity across all major VR platforms.
Read the case study to learn how they used a broad range of Unity’s multiplayer services to build, network, and scale this adrenaline-fueled multiplatform experience.
Shortly after gamescom, we interviewed this year’s CommUnity Choice Award winner Tomas Sala (The Falconeer) to learn more about his new project, Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles, a procedural city-builder set in the Falconeer universe.
Read the interview for insights on how Sala plays with game genres, why he always designs control schemes for gamepad before keyboard and mouse, and the reason he thinks indies should go all-in on their IP.
Subcult Joint’s debut game Cookie Cutter is an ambitious and irreverent beat-em-up Metroidvania. The game's distinctive visuals are inspired by ‘90s comic books and created using traditional animation techniques and rendered in URP.
Dive into the case study to learn how this small team organized thousands of hand-drawn assets and added depth to their labyrinthine world with 2D lights.
BAFTA-nominated Harold Halibut is a hand-made narrative adventure built from real-world objects, and it’s one of the first games to launch with features from Unity 6.
Explore this case study to learn about SLOW BROS.’s experimental development approach, and how High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) graphics features like Adaptive Probe Volumes (APV) and Spatial-Temporal Post-Processing (STP) helped them showcase every in-game asset and diorama in their best light.
Den of Wolves: Building a co-op shooter game in Unity 6
10 Chambers’s Hjalmar Vikström and Svante Vinternatt share how they’re using Unity 6 in production to create realistic environments for their upcoming squad-based shooter Den of Wolves.
Watch the video to see how 10 Chambers thinks about Den of Wolves’s visual identity, the tech helping them build it, and how the studio thinks about long-term success.
How does a small team build a massive open-world survival game supporting up to 60 concurrent players? Sink your teeth into the revamped V Rising case study for insights on how Stunlock Studios used DOTS and HDRP to create their monstrous open-world vampire survival adventure for PC – and reached even more players by launching on PlayStation®5.
Stay tuned for more deep dives and behind-the-scenes scoops on the latest mind-blowing games and the studios that get them made.