On October 2020, I just moved to Norway to have a gap-year, to experience new culture and of course to meet new friends. Pandemic made it very hard to find a temporary job even though everything was still open in Norway. I did not want to just wait forever for a job offer so I started to plan a tool for Unity to pass the time. At this time I had a lots of experience on Unity from my previous jobs (automotive simulation, data generation for machine learning, automation through reinforcement learning) so I felt already comfortable using the Unity engine. I went through many ideas and finally settled on that Unity needs better fire simulation capabilities. So I started to plan and prototype my idea and after two weeks I had the first version of fire simulation. From the start I knew that visuals and performance would be more important than precisely realistic fluid-simulation formulas and behaviour, since Unity is meant for real-time applications. So I aimed to “fake” the fire as realistically as possible. This is an usual practice especially in the gaming industry. So here is the first version that I published in the asset store to test the markets.
Yeah.. The first version was dirty but it worked. My mentality producing this was agile: build fast, deploy faster, throw away if it does not succeed. To my surprise, developers actually bought my tool, gave feedback and requested more features. I thought that I might actually help someone realize their dream project by accelerating their development process. I spent next two months continuously deploying new versions of the product and gathering as much as feedback as possible from my users (this is agile software development as you may know). Here is a trailer for the final product.
After that the tool was merited by Unity by getting the #1 featured spot on their Asset Store front page and by getting to Top 25 on paid tools category. By this time I thought that I cannot pass this as a hobby anymore thus Arctibyte was born.
After founding Arctibyte I thought that if I could help someone else with my expertise I will gladly do so. So at the point of writing this post I am open to freelancing (Unity or other technologies) and looking for a job as the maintenance of Unity tools take only small portion of my time per week.
Send me a message if you would like to know more or have a chat!
All the best,
Tuomas
