Cmune’s Company Profile on Unity Website
Thanks to our friends at Unity for welcoming us on their website!
CMUNE is leading the development of next-generation social games. They created Paradise Paintball, the first 3D social shooter available across Facebook, MySpace and Apple.com as a Dashboard Widget.
Who Are You?
Cmune was founded in 2007 with the vision of creating a social 3D platform. We realized pretty quickly that the best way to convince other people that we weren’t crazy was to build a successful flagship product on that platform, and thus Paradise Paintball was born.
What Games Are You Working On?
We released Paradise Paintball, the first social shooter in early 2009. We are pretty happy with the fact it was the first free-to-play, multiplayer 3D FPS on a social network with a virtual goods business model and even mobile payment.
It is also now available on MySpace and is the first game to be cross-channel which means Facebook users play can play in real-time with MySpace or Apple Widget users.
We’re also working on a browser-based MMORPG with a partner in San Francisco which will enter Beta mid 2010. It’s under wraps at the moment, so we can’t say too much but it implements a lot of cool Unity tech and it’s built on the Cmune platform!
What’s the production plan?
In 2009 we invested heavily in getting our technology to a level that we were happy with, and we can tell you that it wasn’t easy! Releasing Paradise Paintball early got us a lot of user feedback, which helped tremendously in refining and scaling our platform. We would recommend releasing early with a “Minimum Viable Product” and building a community as soon as you can – we’ve been amazed at the community support and have been unofficially named “the people’s game” because our developers work closely with players in the community.
We know it’s not easy making games, particularly ones that make money for the developers, and that’s the problem we want to solve. There’s a big shift toward free-to-play (virtual goods) and social network distribution, which are already massive in Asia and taking the West by storm. Those elements are two of the key strengths of our platform. We also have a real-time multiplayer SDK, a JSON-based Web Service API that hooks tightly into Unity for features like leaderboards, clans, inventory, avatar customization, social graph and virtual economy interfaces. Finally we have payment channel integration for Mobile, Credit Card, Paypal and OfferPal. We are currently looking for partners who wish to leverage our platform to develop or port their game.
We are growing our team (yes, we are hiring!) and our plan is to continuously improve our platform and offer more useful technology and operational insight to developers we work with.
How Is Your Toolchain Put Together
To create Paradise Paintball, we started off stealing most of the art from Ethan (resident Unity Asset Maestro) to get the first version online – we’re forever in his debt for the Lerpz character, which is quite a legend in our community.
Unity is famous for having a sweet asset pipeline and we use that extensively, our art team knows how to use Unity and tweaks a lot within the engine. We also use an artwork SVN repository to distribute and version assets between the dev and art teams.
Editor scripts are a huge time saver and we have an SVN project to share good editor scripts across all of our Unity projects, as well as common assets like shaders and particle effects.
What Obstacles Did You Run Into?
Overall the biggest obstacle is convincing players to download a plug-in, but with all of the large publishers picking up Unity of late, it is becoming far less of an issue.
Aside from this, we had issues early on with Mono, and P2P networking proved tricky, but we found ways to work around those. We’re looking forward to a Mono update and more hooks in PhysX.
Which Was the Best Part of The Unity Experience?
In the early days and despite the “startup” status of Unity at the time, the awesomeness of the community and Unity team was second to none. This was our main reason for adopting Unity, even though it wasn’t the most fully featured engine, we thought “these guys are going somewhere”, and we were right!
Technically, the ability to write once and deploy to multiple target platforms is great. But realistically the web player is the killer feature for us: the ease of distribution, updates and ability to interface with all things web is a whole new game that is just starting to play out.
