In this blog post we are going to have a closer look into the magic behind our upcoming title The Supernauts.

The engine, which enabled us to create this fabulous The Supernauts universe, is called Unity (It also creates the air around turfs so that citizens can live on them). Basically it keeps all the pixels in line so that everything runs smoothly and doesn’t fall apart. Our CTO Mikko Wilkman is probably the best person inside the company to answer Unity related questions. So we had a little chat with him.

Mikko, what were the main reasons to go with Unity?

Initially, Unity was something that helped us prototype ideas very rapidly. Soon it was clear that mobile, tablet and web as gaming platforms are constantly changing and evolving, and Unity is a great cross platform tool that helps us keep up with this pace and remain flexible, what ever direction the industry takes. Even now that we’re fully focused on iOS, Unity makes it easy to target all the different iOS devices. We love coding in C# and Unity provides an excellent environment where artists, designers and coders can create amazing things together.

What would you think are the best features currently?

Having a shared, usable environment for everyone in the development team is great. Keeping our options open with cross-platform support is something that helps us sleep at night even when focusing on a single platform right now. We just switched to Unity 4 and are still learning some of the new stuff, Mechanim for example has been proven excellent for animation!

Could you tell a little bit more about the cross platform support?

The cross platform support is pretty amazing. The Supernauts started as a prototype on iPad, and after that we continued development of it as a web application using the Unity plugin. When we decided it’s time to focus 100% on iOS, the first time we compiled the game to run on iOS, it actually worked, out of the box, zero changes on the codebase. Of course there’s lots of UI tweaks, 3rd party SDK’s and integrations you need to add on top of the bare bones cross platform product but the core cross platform support really does work. It’s interesting to see what happens with the deep collaboration Unity is currently doing with Facebook for example and where the mobile platforms are heading to in the future.

Ok, so as a last question how long does it take to create the Universe?

Currently the universe is created in about 160 milliseconds but we’re always working to optimize and improve.

Pretty fast, huh?