In a post on Unity's official blog, Nicholas Francis, the chief creative officer and co-founder of the company, has announced he is leaving the engine provider to pursue game development.
"As great as it has been building Unity, I have come to feel that actually using it is what really scratches my itch," writes Francis.
"It’s made me realize that I have games I want, no need, to make!"
Francis has contributed a great deal to both the features and the interface of the popular game engine over the last decade. In an interview published last year, he told Gamasutra that his role was to help take Unity's tech and "make sure it works all the way round and that it's easy to use and it's easy to learn."
"And that's sort of my job -- to sit down with everybody and figure out, 'How do we make this simple? How do we make it so that anyone can figure out how to use it?' And that's a really hard problem to solve, in many cases."
"This has not been an easy choice – in fact, it has been one of the hardest ones in my life," writes Francis, on the company blog. "I’ve given to Unity all I had to give, and now I gotta go do what I gotta go do."
So sad to see Nick go. He was the one in the top ranks to push Unity towards not-so-flashy-yet-needed avenues, like the new GUI and a global timeline, similar to Flash's. I'm afraid Unity will suffer in the long run with the lack of his vision and "future-proof" attitude. Anyways, like he said, you gotta do what you gotta do. So best of luck Nick, it was a pleasure and an honor trading some e-mails with you and re-creating one of your art pieces :)
Hopefully someone within Unity "gets it" enough to keep things simple and comprehensible like Nicolas did. That interview last year gave me new insight into Unity's design. We all appreciate your contributions, best of luck making a killer game with THE killer tool.
It certainly beats 'blahblah is leaving to pursue other opportunities'.