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Learn best practices and move toward more efficient development with guides by experts.
Bring your big idea to life
You know what you want to make – but how do you translate abstract ideas into a playable game? Bridge the gap with expert workflows and advice from the Unity Game Designer Playbook.
Stand out in a crowd
Many of today’s most popular games feature attention-grabbing 2D art. Sharpen your visuals with the 2D game art, animation, and lighting for artists e-book and get your game noticed.
Create polished experiences
No amount of visual flourish or engaging gameplay can make up for poor performance. Get your creation running crisply with the Ultimate guide to profiling Unity games.
Designing games with impact
People want to see themselves reflected in the games that they play. But how do you design games that truly make an impact? Learn how Soft Not Weak, Kitfox Games, and Tribe Games prioritize diversity, interactivity, and accessibility in game design to reach new audiences. Working on an impactful game of your own? Apply for funding and mentorship through the Unity for Humanity program. Get details below.
Indie innovators bring imagination, playfulness, and diversity to the games industry. Check out these stories featuring gamedevs who chose Unity to achieve their vision.
Skul: The Hero Slayer
Skul: The Hero Slayer is an award-winning action rogue-lite with stunning pixel art. Check out the blog and case study to learn how SouthPAW Games managed their 2D assets to maximize efficiency during production, then check out the e-book below for a technical how-to on 2D game art, animation, and lighting for artists.
I Am Fish
For their latest game, BAFTA-nominated Bossa Studios wanted to make a splash with AAA visuals – but realistic water effects can be tricky to get right. See how they achieved stunningly convincing water rendering and light refractions with Unity’s High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP), then read our HDRP graphics e-book to level up your lighting skills.
Subway Surfers
Read the case study to see how Unity uses hands-on feedback from SYBO to fine-tune features like Nested Prefabs and the Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS). SYBO has helped Unity refine its platform with extensive user experience data and innovative engineering, while Unity has supported SYBO as they built the iconic Subway Surfers, a hit mobile game with over three billion downloads to date.
Fantasian
Hironobu Sakaguchi had a singular vision for Fantasian: Every scene in the game unfolds on handcrafted dioramas. Read the case study to learn how Mistwalker imported 150 dioramas into Unity using photogrammetry and condensed 500 GB of gamedata into a 4 GB masterpiece for mobile, then get Unity’s guide to profiling mobile games to learn how to get more mobile performance for your game.
TUNIC
TUNIC is one of the biggest indie success stories of the year, receiving recognition for its challenging randomized combat and unique approach to storytelling. Learn about ISOMETRICORP Games’s approach to development in this blog post, then explore how to use randomization in game design to boost player engagement below.
Tentacular
In Firepunchd’s new VR game Tentacular, players assume the role of a gigantic tentacled beast with a heart of gold. Discover how Firepunchd landed on the concept through rapid prototyping, optimized a surprisingly complex set of tentacles for performance in VR, and crafted a truly immersive – and hilarious – VR experience.
Sable
Shedworks come from humble beginnings: The studio is so named because they started making games in a garden shed. Read the case study to learn how they made the award-winning Sable using worldbuilding tools like ProBuilder and resources from the Asset Store.
Tinytouchtales
Arnold Rauers has launched a string of highly entertaining and financially successful mobile games as Tinytouchtales. But when he started using Unity, he didn’t know how to code. Check out this case study to see how tools like visual scripting helped him transition from communications design to game design and build a successful games business with more than one million yearly downloads.
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Unity for solo devs and indie studios
More than just a game creation platform, Unity solutions and services support solo devs and small studios every step of the way, from big idea to big success.
Tools to help you grow
Access solutions that help small teams scale their creative efforts to compete with larger studios that have more resources.
Unity for mobile games
Explore tools to make it easier to test, optimize, deploy, and launch on mobile.
Frequently asked questions
If you’re new to Unity, you or your team can take advantage of guided pathways to build out the skills you’ll need to faithfully create your vision in Unity.
The ability to test and iterate quickly is at the heart of all quality creative pursuits. Outline your vision and allow yourself the flexibility for creative iteration and testing. Unity offers several tools to empower you as much as possible without forcing you to code yourself into a creative corner. Explore best practices and tools.
With the Scriptable Render Pipelines (SRP), Unity provides the most flexible way to achieve the precise look and feel to represent your idea best. If you aspire to high fidelity graphics, the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) can provide highly photorealistic experiences and visual effects. The Universal Render Pipeline (URP) provides artist-friendly workflows that help you efficiently create optimized graphics across a range of platforms.
Unity is designed to be friendly to small teams of generalists, and does not require larger teams of specialized developers, or previous AAA experience to make something great. While experienced developers can utilize in-depth tools and customization, Unity can be used effectively off-the-shelf, helping generalists apply the same high quality treatments to their games that bigger studios achieve.
Unity is designed to help teams create fun, new gameplay, tell heartfelt or quirky stories, and express a wide range of visual art styles. It’s open and flexible enough to do all these things, making no assumptions about creative intent and providing complete creative freedom for the gameplay, stories, and visuals that indies dream up.