9:00 am EDT – Live Global Keynote

Unite is finally back, and we can’t wait to tell you about what’s new in this year’s keynote.

Come hear about enhancements to Editor tooling, device support, and rendering that help you build the games you want, how you want.

Discover workflows to help you scale your game with new content, analysis, and multiplayer support.

And see how we are putting innovation in your hands with supercharged performance capabilities and cutting-edge graphics. 

This year’s stellar lineup of speakers include:

• John Riccitiello, President & Chief Executive Officer
• Lucas Meijer, Technical Director
• Will Goldstone, Senior Manager, Product Design
• Laurent Gibert, Senior Manager, Product Management
• Kiki Saintonge, Senior Technical Product Manager
• Timothy Vanherberghen, CEO, Triangle Factory
• Stacey Haffner, Director, Technical Product Management
• Russel Sng, Developer Advocate, Games Backend Solution
• Caleb Atwood, Staff Software Engineer
• Sharon Shi, Senior Product Marketing Manager
• Silvia Rasheva, Senior Manager, Content Production
• Raymond Graham, Director, Graphics Engineering
• Dorrene Brown, Senior Technical Product Manager, XR
• Nathaniel Ventura, co-founder and CEO, Vinci Games
• Hannah Kennedy, Art Director, Obsidian Entertainment
• More to be announced soon!

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10:40 am EDT – Stay DRY: Adopting a modular code workflow

Who doesn’t like to save time and effort? Join this session to learn how to easily adapt a modular team workflow across the full stack while writing new code. This talk touches on the Unity Package Manager, symbolic links, Git submodules, and more.

Robin Vonsien

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10:40 am EDT – Building games that keep your players happy 

Keeping your players happy and engaged is an ongoing challenge, regardless of game type or target platform. This session shares best practices for delivering fresh content in your game, how to run tests with your players, and how to analyze the results to know what improvements to make.

Russell Sng

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10:40 am EDT – Understanding Unity’s 2023 roadmap

Join this session to hear about Unity's roadmap for 2023 and get an overview of Unity’s vision. Plus, Andrew will tell you about upcoming developments for the Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS), graphics, artist tooling, multiplayer games, and more.

Andrew Bowell 

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11:10 am EDT – Designing a game for player-first monetization

Implementing monetization in a game doesn’t mean sacrificing player experiences for profit. Strategic and holistic monetization design can be both player-first and revenue positive. In this session, we look at four pillars of player-first monetization design and cover how Unity makes it easy to put them into practice.

Matt Dondelinger

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11:10 am EDT – Helping new players discover your game

Did you know that the Apple App Store and Google Play combined have over 1.4M games?  You've worked hard to launch your game, but how can you make it stand out? In this session, learn how to get organically discovered through app store optimization and prepare your game for paid user acquisition.

Josh Salzberg, Solmaz Yilancioglu

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11:40 am EDT – Unity Gaming Services: What’s ahead in the next six months

Unity Gaming Services, the modular platform for live game development, launched in June and is regularly releasing new services and features to help developers build live game foundations, engage players, and grow their games. Hear from the UGS product team on what’s coming soon for multiplayer, community solutions, and player engagement.

Joanna Van Gansen

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11:50 am EDT – Stunlock and Unity: Why source access to DOTS is a game changer

When V Rising soft-launched, it was so popular that it caused significant strain on GPU as well as frame rates. Join Unity’s Sebastian Schöner, senior software engineer, and Stunlock Studios' Rasmus Höök, technical artist, as they discuss identifying and resolving performance challenges within a DOTS-based game.

Sebastian Schöner, Rasmus Höök

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11:50 am EDT – Lighting environments with Unity

Step into the famous Sponza Atrium to see how to beautifully light an environment from scratch using a mix of baked and real-time techniques. Pierre Yves will showcase the GPU Lightmapper, the new Probe Volume system, ray tracing, and path tracing.

Pierre Yves Donzallaz

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12:20 pm EDT – Making Alba: Building a performant open-world game

Go behind the scenes with the custom tools and technology ustwo Games built to develop Alba: A Wildlife Adventure. Manesh guides you through the important dos and don’ts the studio followed in order to create this open-world game that runs on low-end mobile devices.

Manesh Mistry

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12:20 pm EDT – Authoring character poses with AI

If you have little or no experience authoring character poses, don’t miss this talk. Florent presents a tool that leverages both machine learning and a physics engine to enable you to create natural-looking poses in just a few seconds.

Florent Bocquelet

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12:40 pm EDT – Small teams, big communities: Solving challenges with assets

Featuring Unity game creators and publishers, this panel session answers questions on how they leveraged art and tools from the Asset Store. They’ll also highlight how the future of game development will greatly benefit from building together by leveraging talent and assets from creators all over the world.

Renaud Forestié, Freya Holmér

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1:00 pm EDT – Evolving A Township Tale’s VR world streaming tech

Discover the evolution of A Township Tale’s VR world streaming backbone and learn about the game’s networking, dynamic loading, batching, physics, AI, and more. Gain insight into the current state of Alta's tooling, how they got there, and the realities of working on a live, complex game.

Nic Gomez

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1:00 pm EDT – Customizing performance metrics in the Unity Profiler

Learn how to supercharge performance analysis in the Unity Profiler with your game-specific content. This session explains the workflow of adding new performance metrics and surfacing them in the Unity Profiler, and also spotlights the extensibility API in Unity 2021.

Andy Barnard

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1:30 pm EDT – Persistent worlds: Managing player and world state

Working on a multiplayer? Join this session to see a model for handling persistent data in a multiplayer context. You’ll also get up to speed on PlayerPrefs, CloudSave, and general-purpose DBs, plus get a glimpse at how Unity Gaming Services is planning to empower the next generation of experiences.

Benoit Gagnon

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1:30 pm EDT – Speed up your workflow: 20 tips in 20 minutes

Recent Unity releases include many improvements and “bite-sized” features that enable you to achieve more in less time. So put on your seatbelt and get a quick run-through of how to amp up productivity no matter if you’re an artist or a programmer.

Thomas Krogh-Jacobsen

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1:40 pm EDT – Empowering workflows for non-coders in Unity

Calling coders and non-coders alike. Unity 2021 brings new ways to help you work more easily in the Editor. Learn how to extend features like Unity Visual Scripting, Shader Graph, and VFX Graph to help you and your teammates save time and improve collaboration, regardless of coding experience.

Ashley Alicea, Ben Cloward, Marie Guffroy

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2:10 pm EDT – DOTS: Scaling MonoBehaviour and GameObjects 

Learn more about working in a GameObject / MonoBehaviour space based on data-oriented design. This session walks you through how popular game Indus Battle Royale uses its DOTS-based GenericLOD to scale conventional GameObject-based systems for animation, rigs, assets, and visual effects.

Rohan Jadav

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2:40 pm EDT – Ker-SPLAT: Overhauling world interactions in Cosmonious High

Expert Graphics engineer Ben Hopkins covers the journey of completely overhauling SplatTech – the engine Owlchemy Labs created to allow players to paint, freeze, or burn any surface in the game with virtually no lag – to run on a mobile processor for Meta Quest 2.

Ben Hopkins

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2:50 pm EDT – Extending the Unity Editor with custom tools using UI Toolkit 

Like building your own UI tools? Here we go step by step with the UI Builder to quickly create an Inspector for real-time Play mode debug data visualization. Then we’ll enhance it using USS Transitions and the Vector API, migrate it to a custom Editor window, and finally port it to the Player/Runtime.

Damian Campeanu

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2:20 pm EDT – Achieve 200 players at 60 Hz in a AAA-grade battle royale

Dive into the development of a server-authoritative battle royale shooter for 200 players running a 60-ticks-per-second netcode. The project is available for free on the Unity Asset Store, powered by Photon Fusion and Multiplay hosting and matchmaking.

Erick Passos, Dan Richards

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3:00 pm EDT – Lessons learned: Moving from traditional tech to gaming

Join this session to learn the major differences between building a tech startup and a gaming startup. Benefit from Brandon’s expertise as he highlights the traditional tech that migrated well (and what didn’t work so well), and what he’s learned from creating a game.

Brandon Jahner

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4:15 pm EDT – Made with Unity Virtual Concert featuring Blu DeTiger

Once the Unite sessions wrap, the excitement amps up with a world’s first multi-destination concert featuring an electrifying musical performance, lively worlds of player avatars, real-time audio-visual effects, and so much more. And it’s all Made with Unity. Join via VrOOm, Future Fest, YouTube, or by registering on the virtual platform.

Artist: Blu DeTiger

There’ll be guest speakers, thought leaders, and the people behind some of your favorite Unity games, experiences, and features.

A big part of Unite is empowering our community of creators, developers, and others to build connections. Join us in one of these cities to network, learn, and be inspired: Austin, Brighton, Copenhagen, Montreal, or San Francisco.