UK's LARGEST UNITY PORTING DAY - MICROSOFT / NOKIA / UNITY

What an awesome day...

Nokia decide to hold a one day porting event at their London offices along with Microsoft and Unity.

The challenge of the day was to take an existing app, either on iOS, Android, Blackberry or any other platform and port it to Windows Phone and / or Windows Store in that same day. A tonne of help was available throughout the day along with food and drink to keep the energy levels up. If that wasn’t enough lots of shiny Nokia toys were readily available to test on.

If we can get the apps published to the Windows Store by next week then we will be rewarded with a variety of Nokia devices. What better incentive to get the head down get Prison Escape II completed.

Traveling from Scotland to such events in London or further is always a difficult decision to justify. It’s going to be expensive just to get there so it is important to plan what you intend getting out of such events. In other words you need to get your moneys worth. You need to arrive back at the studio the following day and confirm that you got what you went for plus a little extra.

So did I get what I hoped for from this event?...

After virtually being stripped searched at Edinburgh airport, it was time to jump on the 6:35am flight to London Heathrow. A strong wind on our tail meant we were 20 minutes early. Heathrow express to Paddington followed by a short walk and I was being greeted at the Nokia offices with breakfast. All good so far.

Naturally many of us there were iOS developers arriving with our Macs and iOS devices so the first order of the day was to install Windows Pro 8, the Windows SDK and Unity for Windows onto a variety of Macbooks. This proved to be a slow and demoralizing task with the entire morning spent staring at progress bars.

After a lovely spot of lunch from a hot and cold buffet, my Unity project was ready to open and test. Fixing a couple of small errors due to left over iOS specific code and my project was ready build to the Windows platform. A couple more minor errors fixed by the evangelists on hand and Prison Escape II was looking and running beautifully on the Nokia 820 phone. No signs of lag so it was time to test on the lower spec Nokia 520. Again running well with no issues and no lag. This was success right there!

It was now time to do some networking - something I am not good at but for these events it is important and worth more than any amount of freebies. The rooms were full of a fantastic mix of people:

Indie developers

Game Studios

Microsoft evangelists

Unity experts

Marketing teams

Nokia organisers

And lets not forget the catering staff who laid on some nice cold beers to help wind down the day.

Back on the plane to Edinburgh, I reflected on the day. I arrived with a Macbook Pro and an iOS app and I left with Windows Pro 8, Windows Phone SDK, Unity Pro installed on my laptop and my app up and running on Nokia devices. I have 10 days to finish things off and I’ll be rewarded with a shinny new Nokia device.

On top of that I met some wonderful people and gained a wealth of sound advice from industry experts. I look forward to more events like this.