FFWD ports Unity3D game engine to XNA, Windows Phone, will become open source

In the gaming front, Windows Phone does have an advantage over its competitors through its extensive Xbox Live integration (though that exclusivity is set to expire), but many developers who have been looking to port their existing iOS or Android games to Microsoft’s platform have found the lack of native code access to be severely limiting. For instance, Unity3D, a popular mobile game engine, doesn’t work on Windows Phone since it requires native code – however, Press Play has now created a toolset called FFWD (for Fast Forward) with which games using the Unity3D engine can be ported over.

In a new post on Facebook, the game studio says that FFWD allows developers to create games with Unity, and then port them over to XNA to make them compatible with Windows Phone.

Interestingly, they say that they’ve been already using that toolset in their own games, Tentacles and Max and the Magic Marker. There were rumors in December that Kinectimals was built with Unity3D, although it didn’t actually use any native code, suggesting that Microsoft was using FFWD at the time by collaborating with Press Play, whose Windows Phone titles are both Xbox Live enabled.

In Press Play we have built a toolset for porting Unity games to Windows Phones and now we want to make it open source.
The toolset called (FFWD or “Fast Forward”) has been used in getting games like Tentacles and Max from Unity3D to the Windows Phone.
What we have done is to recreate a version of the Unity framework within XNA. This allows us to build and design the game within Unity and build it in XNA and eventually play it on our Windows Phone. For a Unity centered studio like ours, it has been great because it has allowed us to maintain our usual workflow within Unity.

Source: Facebook, via Ubergizmo