Last week, Unity Technologies Japan held an event where they showcased various features of their cross-platform game engine, Unity. The event also included a special feature on their mascot character in Japan, “Unity-Chan”. Game Watch gives us a closer look at what they showed during the event.
To get you up to speed on who and what exactly Unity-Chan is, she was created by Unity Technologies Japan designer “ntny” as an open-source heroine character. She has a 3D character model that can be used by Unity developers to test out their games.
As mentioned in our earlier report, upon seeing Unity-Chan, Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey jokingly mentioned that since Unity has its own mascot girl, maybe the Oculus Rift should have one, too, which prompted Japanese fans to draw their own mascot for the Rift. But coming back to Unity-Chan herself, here’s how she was created.
During the earlier stages of Unity-Chan’s production, Unity felt that it would be better to have a cute character to help in the development of games, but unfortunately, no such character for the engine existed. That’s when Unity Technologies Japan’s Hiroki Omae and ntny decided to come up with Unity-Chan.
The above is a look at Unity-Chan’s original design. While she was cute and had some sex appeal, the creators felt that she wasn’t memorable, and was neither good or bad. More importantly, though, she wasn’t exactly unique.
Since she was being made to help create games, the developers felt that she needed to stand out, and needed some sort of active characteristics, as if were always running, so that she would look natural while in action.
As a result, after further brainstorming, they decided to add features that would come into play with game development in mind. For example, her hair was designed in a way that makes it easier to see where she’s running. They also made sure to have most of her body shape visible without hiding much, so she can be used as a model for various poses.
Her colors were based off the image of a harbor or port, with high-impact and complimentary colors of orange and yellow with blue. According to ntny, his favorite part about her is that she’s wearing a swimming outfit.
While he claims that the purpose for it is for poses and it wouldn’t look weird if she’s gets soaked with water, in the end, it still looked more like a personal touch on ntny’s part, to which Omae jokingly added, “For better or worse, it’s probably the best element that represents Japan.”
Additionally, Unity Technologies Japan revealed that there will also be a second wave of characters, called “Unity Friends” which will feature Unity-Chan and her buddies in a data package that comes with 24 motions, 12 poses, 8 expressions and 45 voices,
