Unite 2007 Event Coverage

I have been keeping my eye on an interesting game engine named Unity. The first Unity users conference, entitled Unite 2007, was held in San Francisco last week; I was asked by Gamasutra to cover the event! This was my first time to officially cover an event and resulted in my first two press credits. It turns out that covering an event is way less stress than running an event and way more stress than simply attending an event. Other than some formatting errors, I think that the following two posts turned out pretty well, thanks to Brandon Boyer for editing and to Brandon Sheffield for supporting my involvement.

Day 1:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=15815

Days 2, 3; Event Wrap Up:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=15851

Other impressions not conveyed in the two reports above: the Unity user community is super friendly, this was really clear. The founders of Unity Technologies are fashionable and exude a lot of confidence and enthusiasm. What I like about them is that anything is possible; they are not an arbitrarily closed black box, marred by bureaucracy, rather they are open to feedback and are very flexible about policy, preferring to form good relations and do what it takes to get thing done. Another admirable quirk is that they profess to borrowing good ideas when they see them, implementing them in Unity “only better”. They seem to be sticklers for doing things well or not at all. I look forward to future developments in their product; if they can stick to their ideals Unity will continue to grow feature rich without sacrificing usability.