Speaker Name

Job Title

Speaker Name

Job Title

Company Name

Time

Session/Activity Name

Session Description

Speaker Name(s)

U/Day Wellington - New Zealand

Wednesday, September 24, 2025 | 9:30 AM - 7:00 PM GMT

Happy Hour Location: Foxglove - 33 Queens Wharf, Wellington Central, Wellington 6011, New Zealand

Join us for a day full of games-focused topics featuring talks by a host of Unity experts. You'll also have the chance to network with fellow developers, meet educators and industry leaders, and connect with the Unity community.

Speakers

Shawn Beck

Sr. Partner Engineer

Unity

As a Senior Partner Engineer at Unity Technologies, Shawn assists developers in creating exceptional games with Unity while also helping to drive technological advancements within the platform.

Jian Hui Queck

Sr. Partner Engineer

Unity

Jian Hui has extensive experience in custom engine development, specializing in integrating open source APIs like DirectX, OpenGL and OpenXR. He has successfully shipped award-winning training systems with VR capabilities.

Penni Johnson

Sr. Client Partner

Unity

A business development leader with 15+ years in the gaming industry. She’s built partnerships across indie and AAA, with a deep focus on supporting indie devs and publishers through strategic, long-term collaboration.

Jeff Royle

Sr. Client Partner

Unity

With 28 years of experience supporting game developers worldwide, Jeff Royle joined Unity in early 2023. He currently manages partners in the ANZ and AMER regions, specializing in Unity Engine and SpeedTree products.

Mark Schoennagel

Sr. Advocacy Manager

Unity

Mark has spent over three decades in 3D animation and visual effects, from the early pixel days of sprite graphics to today’s real-time engines capable of pushing millions of polygons. Now a Senior Technical Manager at Unity, Mark leads the Advocacy team while continuing to do what he loves most: sharing technology with audiences around the globe. Known for his entertaining and approachable presentation style, he transforms complex technical ideas into inspiring, easy-to-digest experiences that keep audiences engaged from start to finish.

Katya Roo

Manager, Partner Relations Management

Unity

With 6 years at Unity and 10+ years of experience in Partner Relations and Customer Support, I help Unity's trusted partners to build successful projects. My team fosters long term partner relationship through advocating for our partners needs, bringing customer feedback to Unity product teams in strategic company discussions, and offering ongoing guidance to ensure mutual growth

Schedule

Agenda

9:30 AM - 10:00 AM

Time of Arrival

10:00 AM - 10:05 AM

Welcome & Opening

10:05 AM - 11:00 AM

What's new in Unity 6

A recap of the latest important changes in the Unity editor today

11:00 AM - 11:10 AM

Break

11:10 AM - 12:00 PM

New optimisation features in Unity 6 featuring Fantasy Kingdom

Learn how to achieve instant performance gains in your Unity projects using new features such as the Resident Drawer, GPU Occlusion Culling and Spatial Temporal Post Processing plus many other new innovations with Unity 6!

12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Lunch

1:30 PM - 2:15 PM

Best Practices You Need to Know in Every Project

Take a quick tour around some tiny knobs and dials within the editor that can have significant impact on your game performance. This session is a refresher of some common settings as well as some obscure options that might've been missed by most Unity developers.

2:15 PM - 3:00 PM

Efficient Shader Management: Stripping, Warmups, and Variant Strategies

Shader variants can easily bloat your build and cause runtime spikes if not managed well. This session dives into how Unity handles shader variants, how to identify what's being used, avoid warmup spikes, reduce build size with variant stripping, and load variants dynamically for better performance and flexibility.

3:00 PM - 3:10 PM

Break

3:10 PM - 3:50 PM

Unity Partner Support Overview

3:50 PM - 4:30 PM

Roundtable Discussion

4:30 PM - 4:35 PM

Closing

5:00 PM - 7:00 PM

Post-Event Mixer (Floxglove - Game Room)

Legal Privacy Policy Cookies

Do Not Sell My Personal Information

Unity Event Terms and Conditions

"Unity", Unity logos, and other Unity trademarks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Unity Technologies or its affiliates in the U.S. and elsewhere (more info here).

Other names or brands are trademarks of their respective owners.