While I first drafted this post in February 2023, I knew it was important to wait a good period to ensure it was genuine and not wrought with emotion.
Is A Good Thing
It had been over three years at Unity when I received word that Unity would no longer fund our team; our positions were being made redundant. I was profoundly disappointed, and the unsettling thought came to me that “I’m not done” making Unity great again. It was undoubtedly a demoralizing day for the many who remained at Unity, as many were quick to point out that our team’s value proposition to every Unity user was astronomically high.
At our core, we put Unity’s users first. We were empowered by executive leadership to bring fixes and features from work we did with studios (and other random tangents) back to the main product. We then took it a step further and backported these things to versions of Unity, where developers had games in active production. The #farewell Slack channel was filled with comments of “this clearly must be a mistake”, “this is getting fixed, right?” and the subtle undertone of a knowledge and skill gap our team’s evisceration would leave in its place.
While this was a difficult and stressful position for our team members at the time, we collectively knew everyone would be alright. Everyone on that team was hired based on bad-ass skills and fitting into the game studio culture we had built inside the team. Everyone was snatched up (many with substantial raises) well before their severances landed in their bank accounts — a few people did take a break before accepting offers, but my point is made.
Where Is The Tea?
Down the drain — As I mentioned at the start of this post, I had written this long ago and had so much more to tell back then. However, I quickly realized that writing out what happened afterward was more of a cathartic experience for me to get things off my chest than it was of any use to put out into the world.
I have far more interesting things to write about than the details of a company imploding because of corporate greed. From my experiences at Bonfire Studios working on Arkheron for the past couple of years to co-founding a new game studio with my brothers-at-arms Karl & Ian, there is so much positive content to be written about. As always, the challenge is finding the time. I continue to be asked to write about the stuff I’ve been doing with Unreal Engine and some of its supporting applications (Horde, UGS, etc.), so that may be where I’ll start trying to focus a small amount of time. I’m not sure what that content looks like, but I think it might be helpful to get me posting again.
Maybe.
Make Unity Great Again
Ok, fine; here is a short story from my time at Unity that still makes me smile.
The featured image for this post is a hat with a slogan our team had at Unity (ignore the pin; it’s not part of this). Obviously, we were playing off that other politically charged thing … being the little shit-disturbers we were. Our team used the slogan “Make Unity Great Again” to remind us that Unity was, at a point in its history — Great! (see 5.x era). It had the backing of a budding community and a competitive feature list with other game engines. We used that slogan as a north star when developing features and pushing to backport bug fixes when no one else would. We were infamous inside the company for doing things for the user and landing things where no one else could.
As with any dev team, there has to be some sort of swag to remember it by. We initially tried the proper channels route. Unfortunately, when the manufacturer saw the content, they flagged it to Unity’s marketing team, who were not fond of the brand usage (I don’t see a brand, do you?). This resulted in what quite possibly could have been my first run-in with a particular egotistical self-absorbed asshole that had risen too far inside that organization. I didn’t know it then, but that character was responsible for blocking progress at Unity, but that’s a different story.
Some formal complaints were made against us, and minor slaps on the wrists were given. Still, I think everyone involved saw the absurdity of what was happening, so the issue was left to die, or so they were led to believe. We used our money and embroidery service to make the hats ourselves, and on our last onsite, we handed them out to everyone covertly. The hat, to me, is the most valuable swag I got out of my time at Unity, for it forever will remind me of the cool stuff that a small group of developers could accomplish for the general user when they put their mind to it.
On a fun note — even David has one of these hats! They have become a rather sought-after piece of swag.
The Forgotten Soul 