Unity for artists: why would it be nice to know more about this tool?
Portuguese version [Link].
In the last year, encouraged by my observations on the market and by seeing how some professionals from other companies were working (I talked to people from King and Rovio), I decided it was the time to resume an old project: to get to know Unity deeply. When I worked at Miniclip, Play Kids and Monster Juice, I’ve already had experience with the platform, and this time I took advantage of the opportunity I had here at Wildlife to get my hands dirty and develop my knowledge about it.
Besides all the experience I acquired, I couldn’t help noticing that it is a powerful work tool; together with the Git platform, it allows several developers to work together on the same project. The learning curve of Unity requires dedication, but at least to navigate the flows, make small changes and interact with the project, you don’t need to have a great knowledge of the tool.
As many of you may already know, Unity is a game production tool used in the largest and most relevant mobile game producers in the world. It has a robust engine, developed to fit perfectly in the mobile industry, taking advantage of the technologies already existent in all current smartphones. Its format allows exporting the project to several platforms, which is a great advantage to, consequently, save time and money for production companies. For artists and designers who want to enter the universe and build a solid career, knowing how to use this tool will definitely be a big help in the journey. The deeper we advance in knowledge about it, the more space we have in the project and the more relevant contributions we are able to offer on a daily basis.
For those who are worried about how to get started, it is worth mentioning that it is possible to bring projects from outside into Unity independently. An important point is also that programming knowledge is not required for visual implementations (except in very specific cases). In the UI part, when we create a new screen, we bring assets that we created in software like Figma, Photoshop, Sketch, among others.
The artist will be able to implement this in the project and help with the final version, the same one that the player will have in his hands. There is a visual interface that makes it easier to interact with the tool, with specific usage patterns that need to be studied. It lets us add 2D images, 3D elements, as well as create animations using timelines in a very similar way to those we have in other programs. Unity is flexible, so we will come across different cases, such as implementations defined through programming, often with exposed parameters that can be used by artists or not. We can point out that working with Unity will, in most cases, be a team effort.
One of the big advantages brought by the program to the development and maintenance of the project is the possibility of producing new tools. These tools can be developed by the team itself to solve specific problems or simply to make day-to-day life easier, and all of them can be used by the artists. The production of these tools will depend on the maturity and knowledge of the engineers involved in the project.
Tool created to show some parameters of Dotween plugin, which uses codes to make animation.
Another great advantage of being able to work with Unity is the reduction of the production period with the engineer (since it is often difficult to find one), which means money and time savings. As a result, we can see several opportunities, including visual control within the software, as well as the possibility of proposing ideas and polishing the visual part, tasks that become increasingly easier as we advance in knowledge of the tool’s functionalities.
Barriers for designers
During this learning period, I spoke with Unity’s product manager, Benoit Dupuis, who explained to me that you first need to understand the two different tools, the IMGUI (for creating UI editor tools and extensions) and the UGUI (Unity UI, for creating games and apps in Unity Player).
He told me that these two frameworks can be tricky to learn because each one has its own issues and limitations, but they are creating a third solution, the UI Toolkit (whose first version was released last year), which will replace both and will not require artists to have a deep understanding of the former, making it easier to interact with the platform. Their idea is to increasingly improve the UI Toolkit to continue improving this interaction.
Also, among the barriers of the tool for those learning it are the old NGUI technology, which has no updates from the Unity side. Anyone working on an old project may come across it, in which case finding resources to solve potential problems is only possible in forums and old videos. The learning curve of the software requires dedication, but once you get used to it, navigating this universe is no longer a problem.
And what can we earn with Unity?
More and more, mobile game companies are segmenting UI and UX artists: being the UI designer is looking for relevant and consistent visual solutions for the project; the UX designer, on the other hand, creates flows and research to understand how the player or user experience is going. I also see companies moving back to a Product Designer structure, where UI artists and designers play both roles. Particularly, I find it difficult to divide these two disciplines as they mix at all times. With this, the research part of the project can be easily done in Unity, reinforcing the artist’s UX knowledge.
Working in very large companies, with more mature groups, allowed me to see how and what is the importance of UI and UX designers who use Unity to do implementations, in addition to being able to observe what are the differences between them and what impacts these professionals have on the companies they work for.
Knowing how to work with Unity will bring strength to the specialist and help to advance quickly in knowledge about the game. This gives us an expanded view of the project and makes it possible to measure the cost of implementing and changing a new feature that may appear during the work; we also gain insight into opportunities for improvement and real knowledge of what can be done in the project, making us more responsible for its look. Many changes that are priorities on the art side may not be priorities for other teams, like a misaligned button, wrong typography, a color change, things that are easy to tweak, but which, without that knowledge, can go into an eternal backlog that will be overlooked by another priority.
Thinking beyond the visual will lead the artist to have a different perspective. As game producers, we have a responsibility to connect with other types of knowledge, such as monetization, advertising, seeking to understand how the community that plays our game thinks, trying similar and different games. Thus, we achieve the goal of solving problems in a relevant, cheap, fast and aligned way with the company. Knowing and using Unity will also help building this type of solution.
Taking advantage of this whole development and learning initiative for myself, I organized and led a proposal to learn more about this tool, which includes organizing learning schedules, creating a step by step to discover the tool and putting artists in contact with it. With everything I learned, I bumped into easy and difficult content, problems that seemed like they would never be solved, but it is in moments of pain that we learn the most. Mastering the tool isn’t difficult, which doesn’t mean it’s easy either, but it’s something that makes a lot of sense to be in our Pipeline, regardless of how deep we advance in it. What I can also say is that this universe should not be limited only to engineering and more technical artists, as it has a large space to be occupied on the UI/UX side.
I invite you to explore this incredible tool and thus enjoy all the advantages that knowledge about it brings.
Below I’ll leave some of what I consider the most important content to learn more about Unity. This will let you navigate, interact with the tool and beyond that, help you make modifications and implementations inside the project.
Interface: Interface anatomy, understanding the tool’s composition [LINK]
Manipulation: How to navigate and move objects in the editor[LINK]
Prefabs: What are they, how to create, why and how instantiated objects work [LINK].
Asset Import: How to bring images and other objects to the project [LINK].
Power of two: How to optimize the sizes of images [LINK].
UGUI: Components for interface creation [LINK-1] — [LINK-2].
Unity’s official channels and content
[LEARN.UNITY] — [BLOG] — [YOUTUBE] — [DISCORD] — [TWITCH.TV]
Youtube Channels
[CODE.MONKEY.UNITY] — [BRACKEYS] — [IMPHENZIA]
If you want to know my work, you can visit dribbble.com/Komiyama or see my texts on my profile.
